Category: Featured
Yanguang Cao Joins DPET Faculty as Assistant Professor
August 24, 2015Yanguang “Carter” Cao, Ph.D., has joined the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy as of August 1. Cao comes to UNC from the State University of New York at Buffalo. “Dr. Cao’s dedication to research, his ability to be an effective teacher and his many outstanding personal attributes bode well for success here at the School,” says Angela Kashuba, Pharm.D., DPET chair and the John and Deborah McNeill Jr. Distinguished Professor. “He is a promising young investigator in the quantitative sciences, and he will be a highly valuable addition to our faculty at … Read more
Daniel Crona to Join DPET as Assistant Professor
August 18, 2015Daniel Crona, Pharm.D., Ph.D., will join the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy as a tenure-track assistant professor on October 1. Crona will also have an appointment at the North Carolina Cancer Hospital where he will work as a clinical pharmacist specialist in genitourinary oncology. Crona’s research has focused on identifying and validating novel genetic variants associated with survival in patients with advanced or metastatic kidney cancer. Discovery of these variants could help health-care providers identify the patients that would benefit most from different oral chemotherapeutics. “Dan Crona is a highly promising young … Read more
$2.4 Million NIH Grant to Support Study of Tumor Penetration by Nanogel
August 10, 2015UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy nanomedicine researchers received a five-year grant to study whether the properties of certain nanomaterials would improve the delivery of cancer treatments to their tumor targets. The $2.42 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health will fund a collaborative research effort between scientists at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy as well as at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. The researchers plan to study whether the use of a drug-carrying nanoparticle material they’ve designed called the core-shell nanogel can better penetrate tumors. “The whole idea of this … Read more
Jeffrey Aubé Joins Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry
August 3, 2015Jeffrey Aubé, PhD, has traded Kansas blue for Carolina blue and joined the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy as a Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor in the School’s Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry. “Jeff Aubé is an extraordinarily accomplished scientist with an international reputation for conducting ground-breaking research,” says Dean Bob Blouin, Pharm.D. “He is an outstanding educator, a consensus builder and a charismatic leader in the professional world of the pharmaceutical sciences.” Aubé’s research program in organic chemistry encompasses organic synthesis methodology and natural product total synthesis focusing on alkaloids. One of his group’s signature accomplishments is the … Read more
School Receives T32 Grant for Training Program in Cancer Nanotechnology
July 13, 2015A federal grant awarded to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will help grow the workforce of scientists and doctors working in cancer nanotechnology through the launch of a new postdoctoral training program. The University has received a $1.8 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to create a postdoctoral training program within the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery researchers. The program will be run in collaboration with the Carolina Institute for Nanomedicine, the Carolina Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. The award, a … Read more
Shrewsbury Reappointed to USP Compounding Committee
June 25, 2015Robert Shrewsbury, PhD, has been elected to serve a second five-year term on the Compounding Expert Committee of the United States Pharmacopeial Convention. The USP publishes the U.S. Pharmacopeia and National Formulary, which sets standards for prescription and over-the-counter drugs and other health-care products sold in the United States and in many other countries. Shrewsbury is an associate professor in the Division of Practice Advancement and Clinical Education at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has served as an expert on the USP Compounding Committee since 2010. Since he joined … Read more
Eshelman Institute for Innovation Launches
June 2, 2015The Eshelman Institute for Innovation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — created by a historic $100 million gift to the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy in December — has officially launched. The Eshelman Institute aims to inspire a culture of innovation where imagination and creative solutions accelerate change in education, research and health care. The institute provides a mechanism for faculty, staff, and students to seek funding for bold ideas and also provides opportunities to educate and train students and postdoctoral fellows; foster collaboration, creativity, and innovation; and stimulate commercialization of intellectual property and entrepreneurial development. The institute … Read more
School Wins TBJ Life Sciences Award for Chemo-Cleaning Wipe
May 22, 2015The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy received a 2015 BDO Life Sciences Award from the Triangle Business Journal on May 21 in the category of outstanding research university. The School won for the work of William Zamboni, PharmD, PhD, and Stephen Eckel, PharmD, MHA, in developing wipe kits that detect and remove hazardous residue left on surfaces from the preparation of chemotherapy drugs. Eckel, a leading expert on the issue of chemotherapy contamination in the workplace, says studies have found that people who prepare and administer chemotherapy drugs are at risk of developing complications from exposure to those drugs. Despite … Read more
Kashuba to Play Role in New UNC-GSK Partnership to Accelerate Search for HIV Cure
May 11, 2015The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a leading global public research university with significant expertise in HIV basic and clinical research, and GSK, a global, research-based pharmaceutical and health-care company with a legacy of success in developing treatments for HIV, today announced the creation of the dedicated HIV Cure center and a jointly owned new company that will focus on discovering a cure for HIV/AIDS. This unique public-private partnership will redefine the traditional way of conducting research and create a new model to seek the breakthroughs needed to tackle an extraordinarily challenging global health issue. The HIV Cure … Read more
UNC Team Uses Cellular Bubbles to Deliver Parkinson’s Meds Directly to Brain
May 4, 2015Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have used exosomes — tiny bubbles of protein and fat produced naturally by cells — to bypass the body’s defenses and deliver a potent biopharmaceutical directly to the brain to treat Parkinson’s disease. Elena Batrakova, PhD, and her colleagues at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery extracted exosomes from immune cells and successfully loaded them with the enzyme catalase, a potent antioxidant that counters the neuron-killing inflammation responsible for Parkinson’s and other degenerative neurological disorders. Their work was published in the Journal of Controlled … Read more