August 24, 2015
Yanguang “Carter” Cao, Ph.D., has joined the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy as of August 1. Cao comes to UNC from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
“Dr. Cao’s dedication to research, his ability to be an effective teacher and his many outstanding personal attributes bode well for success here at the School,” says Angela Kashuba, Pharm.D., DPET chair and the John and Deborah McNeill Jr. Distinguished Professor. “He is a promising young investigator in the quantitative sciences, and he will be a highly valuable addition to our faculty at UNC.”
Cao’s research focuses on building new pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic models that address challenges in drug development, particularly in the field of nanodrugs, antibodies and cell-based therapies, he says.
“I started my research in drug metabolism and transporters,” Cao says, “But during my Ph.D. research, I was very attracted to quantitative pharmacology. I thought it was amazing that I could use software to simulate biological and pharmacological processes and then optimize them for experimentation.”
For his Ph.D. thesis, Cao developed models for natural polyphenols. He has also worked on a series of minimal pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics models that can generate pharmacokinetic predictions using plasma concentrations. Cao is currently working on integrating tissue receptor dynamics into his minimal models to aid in the discovery of therapeutic antibodies, he says.
Cao says he was attracted to the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy because of its cooperative atmosphere.
“There is no way to adequately address the huge challenges in drug discovery and development unilaterally, and what we need is to work together,” Cao says. “As pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modelers, we often cross several disciplines, such as pharmacology, physiology, mathematics and statistics. I think it is our obligation to use our toolbox to blend these fields together to make an impact.”
Cao earned his Ph.D. in pharmaceutics from the China Pharmaceutical University in 2009 where he was named a top graduate student by the university. He then came to SUNY-Buffalo as a postdoctoral fellow in pharmaceutics. Cao stayed at Buffalo as a research assistant professor in pharmaceutical sciences until he began his appointment at DPET August 1.
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