Category: Featured
Eshelman Awarded Honorary Degree by UNC
June 8, 2017Fred Eshelman, Pharm.D., was recognized by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with an honorary Doctor of Science at the University’s 2017 Commencement held May 14. The University awards honorary degrees to people who have rendered outstanding service to humanity in the world arena, in our nation, in the American South or in North Carolina; people who have made outstanding contributions to knowledge in the world of scholarship; people whose talent and creativity in the world of the arts has enriched lives; and people whose devotion to and support of the University merits the highest recognition. CNN’s Brooke … 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
School Presents 2017 Honors at Awards Ceremony
May 19, 2017The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy held its annual Awards Ceremony on Saturday, April 27, at the Rizzo Center The Pharmacy Network Foundation, Inc. received the School’s Distinguished Service Award. Foundation board members Andy Barrett, Jimmy Jackson, Julian Upchurch, Mickey Watts and Gray Hutchison, Jr. were on hand to accept the award. This award is given to an exceptional supporter of the School’s service and outreach initiatives whose accomplishments and contributions have enhanced the School and the profession of pharmacy at the local, state, national or international level. Elizabeth Ann Dellinger was the winner of the Samuel Burrus Award for … 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
School Hits $36 Million in External Research Funding, Leads in Faculty Funded
May 9, 2017Faculty at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy brought in $36.3 million in extramural research funding in 2016, ranking second among the nation’s schools of pharmacy according to data compiled by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy. The School had 53 investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health, more than any pharmacy school in the country. The School also led the nation’s pharmacy schools in the total number of investigators funded from federal sources with 60 and funded from all sources with 87. The School was first in funding awards from sources other than the federal government at … Read more