Category: Divisions
Students Select 2017 Best Instructors, Williams Tops Overall
June 12, 2017The Doctor of Pharmacy classes at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy selected their favorite instructors of 2016–2017. The winners were presented with an instructor of the year award at the 2017 annual Awards Ceremony held April 22 at the Rizzo Center. The overall instructor of the year is Dennis Williams, Pharm.D. The PY3 instructor of the year is Jay Campbell, J.D. The PY2 instructor of the year is Bob Dupuis, Pharm.D. The PY1 instructor of the year is Carol Otey, Ph.D. The experiential faculty member of the year is Suzanne Harris, Pharm.D. Dennis Williams Dennis Williams is an associate … Read more
Pharmacists Conducting Wellness Visits Spot Problems with Meds, Turn Profit for Practice
June 7, 2017Pharmacists conducting Medicare annual wellness visits in medical practices frequently uncover problems with patients’ medications while generating a profit for the practice, according to a study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Researchers at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy looked at what happens when pharmacists are tasked with conducting annual Medicare wellness visits in a medical practice. During the patients’ first visit, the pharmacists spotted at least one medication-related problem in more in than 90 percent of patients, the majority of which were able to be resolved by the pharmacist. During six- and twelve-month follow-up visits, … Read more
Breakthrough Tool Predicts Properties of Theoretical Materials, Finds New Uses for Current Ones
June 6, 2017Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University have created the first general-purpose method for using machine learning to predict the properties of new metals, ceramics and other crystalline materials and to find new uses for existing materials, a discovery that could save countless hours wasted in the trial-and-error process of creating new and better materials. Researchers led by Olexandr Isayev, Ph.D., and Alexander Tropsha, Ph.D., at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy used data on approximately 60,000 unique materials from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Inorganic Crystal Structure Database to create a … Read more
Doctors Receiving Pharma Payments More Likely to Prescribe Certain Cancer Drugs
June 1, 2017Physicians paid by pharmaceutical companies for meals, talks and travel had higher odds of prescribing those companies’ drugs to treat two cancer types, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study has found. “Ideally, therapy choices should be based on two things and two things only: medical evidence and patient preference,” said Aaron Mitchell, M.D., a fellow in the UNC School of Medicine Division of Hematology & Oncology and the study’s lead author. “As patient advocates, we should try to eliminate any barriers to this. We saw a pretty consistent increase in prescribing of a company’s drug stemming from … Read more
PAINS Killer: Popular Drug Screening Tool Has Serious Problems
May 25, 2017PAINS alerts, a widely used screening tool deployed in the early phases of drug discovery to weed out undesirable compounds, are wrong so often they can’t be trusted on its own, according to scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. PAINS — or pan-assay interference compounds —are a prominent source of false positives in the drug-discovery process. PAINS are biologically active compounds that masquerade as potential drug candidates during the initial high volume screening used to search for possible new drugs. PAINS work by disrupting the assay technology used in the screening to report biological activity, but … Read more
Whitepaper: Enhanced Pharmacy Services Offer Quality and Cost Improvement for Medicaid
May 23, 2017Policy recommendations issued by the Center for Medication Optimization through Practice and Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill call for Medicaid reforms to optimize the benefits of medication and include community pharmacists as an important part of the health-care team. Building on existing efforts in North Carolina, the recommendations include the following: Using models developed from the growing Community Pharmacy Enhanced Services Network to allow health plans to develop community pharmacy pay-for-performance models focused on overall cost of care and quality. Testing the community pharmacy enhanced services care management model within health plans and comparing plan … Read more
Tropsha Joins Scientific Data Editorial Board
May 17, 2017Alex Tropsha, Ph.D., has been named to the editorial board of the Nature journal Scientific Data. Scientific Data is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets and research that advance the sharing and reuse of scientific data. Nearly 200 expert scientists in the biological, physical, social and earth, environmental and ecological sciences comprise the journal’s editorial board. Tropsha is the K.H. Lee Distinguished Professor and the associate dean for pharmacoinformatics and data science at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. He also holds joint appointments in the UNC Departments of Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering and is … Read more
Yuhang Jiang Wins UNC Grad School Impact Award
May 11, 2017Yuhang Jiang, Ph.D., a December 2016 graduate of the pharmaceutical sciences doctoral program at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has received a 2017 Horizon Award from the UNC Graduate School for his research into a treatment to repair the damage to the brain caused by stroke. He is now a postdoctoral associate at Yale University. Stroke is the third leading cause of death and the number-one cause of long-term disability in North Carolina. An estimated 20 percent of stroke survivors require long-term care, and up to 30 percent are permanently disabled. Current treatment focuses on restoring blood flow (known … Read more
Mickey League, Brian Murray Named 2017 Preceptors of the Year
May 10, 2017Mickey League, M.S., of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and Brian Murray, Pharm.D., are the recipients of the 2017 UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s Claude Paoloni Preceptor of the Year Awards. The awards are given annually to the School’s top health-care-system and community-pharmacy preceptors and were created by the Paoloni family in memory of their father, Claude Paoloni, in recognition of his years of service to the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. Kim Leadon, M.Ed., who directs the School’s legacy APPE curriculum presented the awards to League and Murray, who were selected by the graduating Pharm.D. class for their outstanding contribution … Read more
Super Shortcut Makes Quantum Calculations a Million Times Faster
May 4, 2017For those tired of having to book a supercomputer every time they want to design a new drug molecule, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Florida have created a shortcut that can make the process up to a million times faster. When creating a treatment for a disease, scientists look for biological targets that control specific processes in the body. These targets can be thought of as “locks,” and researchers need to design extremely complex molecular keys to fit these locks. To design a molecular key, scientist need to be able to … Read more