Category: Divisions
Kabanov Elected to National Academy of Inventors
December 12, 2017Alexander “Sasha” Kabanov, Ph.D., Dr.Sci., Mescal Swaim Feruguson Distinguished Professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the organization announced Tuesday. Kabanov is the director of the School’s Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery and co-director of the Carolina Institute for Nanomedicine. Election to NAI fellow status is the highest professional accolade bestowed solely to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society. Kabanov … Read more
Bowers Receives $1.9 M NIGMS Outstanding Investigator Award
December 7, 2017Albert Bowers, Ph.D., has received a R35 Outstanding Investigator Award worth more than $1.9 million over five years from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to study the chemoenzymatic synthesis, mode of action and evolution of natural product-based macrocycles. Bowers is an assistant professor in the School’s Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry. He is a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and affiliate member of the Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery. “Natural peptide macrocycles are promising next-generation therapeutics, due to their abilities to bind to challenging protein targets, such as protein interfaces … Read more
Pharmacy Ownership Resident Wins APhA Foundation Award
December 7, 2017Tanner Kowalski, Pharm.D., won the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy Independent Pharmacy Owner Residency Program’s first incentive grant from the APhA Foundation. This APhA incentive grant offers pharmacists, students and community pharmacy residents seed money to implement or support an existing innovative patient-care service within their pharmacy practice. Kowalski’s project analyzes the effect that transition-of-care services have on preventing hospital readmissions for pediatric patients. As part of the transition-of-care program, pharmacists review patients’ medication, identify appropriate interventions, work with providers to implement changes and provide bedside counseling to reinforce proper use of new medications. “Hospital discharge is a critical time … Read more
Fang Promoted to Associate Professor, Granted Tenure
December 4, 2017Gang Fang, Pharm.D., Ph.D., has been promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure in the Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. Fang’s research centers on evaluating treatment utilization and outcomes in populations and pharmacoepidemiology, especially in cardiovascular disease. Fang’s research primarily focuses on estimating real-world comparative treatment effectiveness and safety, identifying optimal treatment strategies, assessing treatment variation in large populations, assessing quality of care related to the treatment variation, medication adherence, and treatment disparities particularly in the elderly and minorities, and developing innovative analytical methods using observational data from large health-care-utilization … Read more
Carpenter, Corbett Win Chancellor’s Entrepreneurial Workshop
December 1, 2017UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy faculty members Amanda Corbett, Pharm.D., and Delesha Carpenter, Ph.D., M.S.P.H., were among the winners of this year’s Chancellor’s Faculty Entrepreneurship Workshop. The two-and-a-half day workshop, called “The Entrepreneurial Mindset – Maximizing Faculty Impact,” split participating faculty members into teams guided by entrepreneurship educators from across the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to create an innovative solution to a problem. At the end, the groups pitched their project to a panel of judges. Corbett is a clinical associate professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics and associate director of global engagement at … Read more
SGC-UNC Collaborates on $2.3 Million Project to Create Open Source Tech for Gene Discovery in Plants
November 30, 2017Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hub of the international Structural Genomics Consortium will partner with the University of California, Davis to study the genes of rice plants responsible for root growth. The scientists will create an open source database and lay the groundwork for developing new varieties of drought resistant crops. The work is supported by a $1 million Seeding Solutions grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, a nonprofit established in the 2014 Farm Bill with bipartisan congressional support. The FFAR grant has been matched with funding from the UC Davis Innovation … Read more
Cao Receives R35 Outstanding Investigator Grant
November 16, 2017Yanguang “Carter” Cao, Ph.D., has received an R35 Outstanding Investigator Grant worth $1.85 million over five years from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to create a platform to optimize antibody-based therapy. “Therapeutic antibodies have achieved great success in a variety of autoimmune diseases and cancers; however, their full therapeutic potential has not yet been realized,” said Cao, an assistant professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. Many FDA-approved antibodies now face high therapeutic hurdles, such as inadequate efficacy when used alone and high occurrences of resistance, and many of … Read more
Cancer Drug Parity Laws Lower Costs for Many but Not All
November 9, 2017State laws designed to ensure that the pill form of cancer drugs is not more costly than treatments given through an infusion in a clinic or hospital have had a mixed impact on patients’ pocketbooks, according to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers. Forty-three states and Washington, D.C,. enacted so-called “parity laws” since 2011 that require patients pay no more for oral cancer treatments than they would for an infusion of the same treatment. In an analysis of the effect of parity laws published in JAMA Oncology, UNC researchers and collaborators from Harvard Medical School report modest improvements … Read more
Kabanov Meets with President of Armenia
November 9, 2017Alexander “Sasha” Kabanov, Ph.D., met with the president of Armenia on Nov. 8 as part of a group of participants in the second All-Armenian Scientific Conference held in the capital city of Yerevan on November 5-8. The delegation consisted of prominent Armenian scientists and scholars from the United States, Russia, France, Ireland, Denmark and other countries. Kabanov is the Mescal S. Ferguson Distinguished Professor at the School and director of the School’s Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery and co-director of the Carolina Institute for Nanomedicine. “It is crucial for young people to have the opportunity of communicating with individuals … Read more
Pharm.D. RASP Students Win National Research Grants
November 9, 2017Amy Lin and Kevin Straughn, both third-year Pharm.D. candidates, have won nationally competitive research grants. Both students are members of the Research and Scholarship in Pharmacy program, a pathway in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy built around a mentored, in-depth scholarly project. Lin was awarded the American Foundation for Pharmaceutical Education’s Gateway to Research Scholarship. Her project is titled, “Developing Hippeastrine Derivatives to Treat and Understand Zika Virus Infection.” Her mentor is Qisheng Zhang, Ph.D., and her award was $5,000. Straughn was awarded the American College of Clinical Pharmacy Research Institute’s Futures Grant Student and Resident Investigator Award. His … Read more