March 25, 2024
Assistant Professor Mackenzie Cottrell, Pharm.D., M.S, co-director of the UNC Center for AIDS Research Clinical Pharmacology and Analytical Chemistry Core, was awarded $2.5 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The five-year grant will fund the creation of a searchable data portal called the HIV Pharmacology Data Repository.
“Our charge, as part of this core facility, is to help investigators at Carolina and other institutions who are working in the HIV space with any clinical pharmacology needs, so we run a lot of samples to measure drug concentrations,” said Cottrell, principal investigator. “We’ve been working for a number of years to get the results of all of these individual requests compiled together into a single, searchable database.”
The hope is to have a data repository where people working in HIV therapeutics or pharmacology can store and share their data with others—making space for more collaboration and less repetitive research.
“For example, if a researcher needs information about how a human or animal body takes in, moves around, and gets rid of an HIV medicine over time, they can come to our repository, search, explore and learn without having to conduct their own study,” said Cottrell.
Expanding data archives, promoting scientific exploration and characterizing user preferences are top priorities in transforming this database. With artificial intelligence (AI) becoming more prevalent, Cottrell is excited to work with Alex Tropsha Ph.D., K.H. Lee Distinguished Professor in the Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry, in utilizing AI for expanding their data archives.
“I am extremely happy for Dr. Cottrell to receive this highly competitive award from NIAID. What started several years ago as a brief and simple request to help her and her team integrate data spread across hundreds of excel spreadsheets has now evolved into a full-blown data science project,” said Tropsha. “This funding illustrates the rapidly changing landscape of experimental research in pharmaceutical science and other disciplines toward modern research data management and AI-driven discovery.”
Having this resource will lead to increased efficiency of the development of existing and new small molecules within HIV therapeutics and accelerate biomedical research discovery.
“The grant is allowing us to take the scaffold of what we’ve already built and turn it into a nationally recognized data sharing service,” said Cottrell.
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