Category: Divisions
Sachiko Ozawa Joins PACE as Associate Professor
October 17, 2016Sachiko Ozawa, Ph.D., M.H.S., has joined the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy as an associate professor in the Division of Practice Advancement and Clinical Education. Ozawa’s principal research interests are in global health economics and outcomes, including estimating the value of vaccines, assessing the global economic burden of diseases and examining the demand and utilization of health care in low- and middle-income countries. She will be leading an internationally recognized and highly collaborative funded research program in global health economics and outcomes, as well as teaching and mentoring students and lending her expertise to the planning and implementation of the … Read more
Unvaccinated Adults Cost the U.S. More than $7 Billion a Year
October 12, 2016Vaccine-preventable diseases among adults cost the U.S. economy $8.95 billion in 2015, and unvaccinated individuals are responsible for 80 percent, or $7.1 billion, of the tab, according to the most comprehensive analysis to date from the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. Researchers led by Associate Professor Sachiko Ozawa studied 10 vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, examined the actual cost of inpatient and outpatient care, cost of medication and the value of productivity lost from time spent seeking care. The ten vaccines protect against 14 pathogens: hepatitis A, hepatitis … Read more
Gauri Rao Joins DPET as Assistant Professor
October 11, 2016Gauri Rao, Pharm.D., M.S., has joined the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experiential Education. Rao’s principal research interests surround quantitative systems pharmacology, and she is working to understand the processes of infectious diseases, specifically how the infecting pathogen and host immune system interact with each other. Her work is extending the knowledge of complex host-pathogen interactions and perturbations imposed by therapeutic interventions during a time of increasing bacterial resistance, a diminishing antibiotic drug pipeline and lack of viable treatment options for infections due to highly drug resistant bacteria. Prior … Read more
NCI Renews Partnership with UNC to Seek New Cancer Drugs
October 6, 2016The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will pursue treatments for specific cancer targets as a specialized member of the National Cancer Institute’s renewed Experimental Therapeutics, or NExT, program through a contract with Leidos Biomed and its Frederick National Lab in Frederick, Maryland. Because of its unique expertise, UNC has been designated a specialized center in the NCI’s Chemical Biology Consortium, the NExT program’s discovery engine. The university’s team is led by Stephen Frye, Ph.D., Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and director of the school’s Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery. … Read more
High Up-Front Costs Could Delay Access to Life-Saving Blood-Cancer Drugs for Medicare Patients
October 4, 2016The significant out-of-pocket costs that cancer patients can face before Medicare drug benefits kick in may delay the patients’ treatment with a new class of highly effective therapies, according to a University of North Carolina study. In the study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers report that nearly a third of a group of patients with chronic myeloid leukemia, and who have federally-funded Medicare health insurance, did not start treatment within six months of diagnosis with any of three targeted drugs that have led to dramatic improvements in survival for the disease. However, patients who had access to … Read more
Amber Frick Joins DPET as Clinical Assistant Professor
September 28, 2016Amber Frick, Pharm.D., Ph.D., has joined the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy as a clinical assistant professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics. Frick’s main responsibilities at the School will be developing expertise in the implementation and assessment of new approaches to and best practices in teaching while also taking part in collaborative teaching activities. Additionally, she will establish a scholarship program in education and collaborate with course coordinators to develop and enhance the teaching and assessment activities in the clinical pharmacology sequence of courses in the new curriculum. “Dr. Frick is an educator with specific skills in … Read more
Blalock Named Chair of FDA Risk Communication Advisory Committee
September 27, 2016Professor Sue Blalock, Ph.D., M.P.H., has been appointed chairperson of the Food and Drug Administration’s Risk Communication Advisory Committee, effective until Sept. 30, 2018. She has been a member of the committee since 2013. Blalock is a professor in the Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy, as well as the division’s vice chair and an adjunct professor in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health’s Department of Health Behavior and Health Education. Blalock’s expertise is in the area of patient and public health education, and she is particularly interested in risk communication and the effect of pharmaceutical care, including … Read more
Kimberly Sanders Joins PACE as Clinical Assistant Professor
September 26, 2016Kimberly Sanders, Pharm.D., has joined the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy as a clinical assistant professor in the Division of Practice Advancement and Clinical Education. She also has a joint appointment at the UNC School of Dentistry as an assistant professor in the Department of Dental Ecology. At UNC Sanders will build relationships between the schools of pharmacy and dentistry to develop, implement and evaluate clinical pharmacy services in dental practice clinics. She will also play a role in creating longitudinal interprofessional education curricula. Sanders is working at the interface of educational and practice-based research, with focus specifically on interprofessional … Read more
Jennifer Elston Lafata Joins DPOP as Full Professor
September 14, 2016Jennifer Elston Lafata, Ph.D., has joined the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy as a full professor with tenure in the Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy. She will serve as associate director of the UNC Institute for Healthcare Quality Improvement and co-leader of the UNC Health Care System’s Cancer Care Quality Initiative. Lafata’s principal research interests surround cancer screening, patient decision-making, and provider-patient communication and patient outcomes. She has published more than 110 peer-reviewed articles during her career and received funding from agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. “Dr. Lafata is … Read more
Study Finds Links between Physicians Setting Cancer-Care Guidelines and Drug Industry
August 26, 2016Nearly 9 out of 10 physicians and researchers who helped develop a leading set of cancer-care guidelines in the United States reported financial ties to the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study found. Of the 125 panelists who worked on setting the National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s guidelines for lung, breast, prostate and colorectal cancer, 108 received some form of industry funding. The funding could include general payments for food, lodging or speaker fees, as well as research funding, according to the study published in JAMA Oncology. The majority of those payments were … Read more