June 21, 2023
The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy ranks No. 2 among the nation’s pharmacy schools in total research funding according to the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.
The School received over $75 million in research grants during the federal fiscal year, October 2021-September 2022 (FY22), nearly doubling the $39 million research total from 2019. There were 84 funded investigators who received $75,082,027 in awards from all funding sources. Of those awards, nearly $60 million was secured in National Institutes of Health (NIH) awards by 59 investigators.
“This ranking reflects our faculty, staff and students’ dedication and commitment to advancing pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. I’m proud to work with this team of innovative scientists, in an environment that sparks and supports high impact scholarship,” said Angela Kashuba, Pharm.D., Dean of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. The School received substantial grants during FY22 that are addressing pressing societal problems.
Tim Willson, Ph.D., professor in the School’s Structural Genomics Consortium received a three-year AViDD award worth over $65 million in partnership with the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and the UNC School of Medicine to help the Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Development Initiative (READDI) establish the Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Center for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern. This award, with $22 million in FY22, is funding research into coronaviruses, flaviviruses and alphaviruses and infrastructure for READDI’s operations. The team will develop broad spectrum oral therapies that target these viral families which have high potential to cause a future pandemic.
Alexander Tropsha, Ph.D., K.H. Lee Distinguished Professor in the Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry, was awarded a five-year $4 million cooperative agreement grant, with $800K in FY22, from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences for his artificial intelligence research. Tropsha is using Reasoning Over Biomedical Objects linked in Knowledge Oriented Pathways (ROBOKOP) graph knowledgebases to represent a unique question and answer platform. This tool will simultaneously explore dozens of integrated sources of biomedical knowledge—ultimately being able to answer complex biomedical questions and accelerate scientific discovery.
Delesha Carpenter, Ph.D., MSPH, associate professor and Executive Vice Chair of the Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy, received a four-year research project grant from the NIH’s National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to create a novel place-based measure to explain the racial disparities in naloxone access to reduce opioid overdose deaths. The grant totals $2.4 million, with $650K received in FY22.
With a five-year research project grant from the NIH’s National Cancer Institute, Shawn Hingtgen, Ph.D., associate professor in the Division of Pharmacoengineering and Molecular Pharmaceutics, is working to pursue therapies that suppress glioblastoma tumor recurrences after surgery. His team is utilizing Continuous Liquid Interface Printing (CLIP) and 3D printers to build unique 3D matrices to assess the impact of different internal and external scaffold features on tumor-homing tumoricidal neural stem cell (tNSC) therapy for post-operative glioblastoma. The grant totals $2.2 million, with $450K received in FY22.
“We are thrilled with the success of our faculty in garnering support for their innovative translational research in pharmacy and the pharmaceutical sciences to improve health care. Receiving this level of research funding reinforces the exceptional things that are being accomplished at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy,” said Kim Brouwer, Pharm.D., Ph.D., William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education.
The AACP validates grant data by institution for NIH, other federal, total federal, non-federal and a sum of all extramural research grants.
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