Category: Grants and Awards
Lai Receives Development Award to Study PEG Immunity
January 30, 2013Sam Lai, PhD, has received a $7,500 UNC Junior Faculty Development Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study the prevalence and properties of preexisting immunity in humans to PEGylated drugs, which could potentially diminishes the efficacy of many PEGylated nanomedicines and therapeutics. PEGylated therapeutics are obtained by modifying drug molecules with polyethylene glycol, or PEG, which markedly reduces interactions with blood proteins and helps the drugs remain active in the bloodstream for longer. However, animal studies suggest that the immune system can develop antibodies against PEG, which can neutralize the polymer’s stealth properties. Preexisting immunity … Read more
Oramasionwu Receives Development Award to Study HIV/HCV Patients’ Use of Outpatient Services
January 28, 2013Christine Oramasionwu, PharmD, PhD, has received a $7,500 UNC Junior Faculty Development Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study how patients infected with both HIV and hepatitis C use outpatient health-care services. Patients with both HIV and HCV infections experience poorer health outcomes than patients who have just one infection or the other, Oramasionwu says, and one possible explanation may be that coinfected patients are underusing outpatient services. If that is true, she says, coinfected patients may not be receiving the recommended antiretroviral and antiviral medicines to the extent that patients with a single infection … Read more
Three Residents Receive APhA Foundation Incentive Grants
January 28, 2013Three PGY1 community pharmacy residents at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy have received $1,000 Incentive Grants from the American Pharmacists Association Foundation. The grants provide seed money to help pharmacists implement or support innovative patient-care services within their pharmacy practice. The School’s 2013 recipients are: Amanda Gates, PharmD, a School alumna who is completing her residency at Kerr Drug in Chapel Hill. Gates will use her grant to complete a research project to evaluate patient knowledge of over-the-counter acetaminophen use and ability to interpret the new Tylenol Extra Strength label. Mandy Hollar, PharmD, who is also a School alumna … Read more
School Spinoff NeuroGate Receives $250,000 Grant
January 8, 2013NeuroGate Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical spinoff company founded by UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy professor Harold Kohn, PhD, has received a $250,000 Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Founded in 2011, Neurogate has developed novel, patentable compounds for the treatment of neuropathic pain and epilepsy. Kohn says the compounds under development are highly potent in established animal models and have a novel combination of actions on sodium channels that prevent neuronal hyperexcitability, which is the hallmark of signaling in seizures and neuropathic pain. “This grant will permit us to complete our structure-activity relationship … Read more
CAPS Wins Two Awards at APhA-ASP Midyear Regional Meeting
November 20, 2012The Carolina Association of Pharmacy Students at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy won the Operation Diabetes award and the Operation Immunization award at the American Pharmacists Association Academy of Student Pharmacists Region 3 Midyear Regional Meeting on November 10 in Raleigh. The CAPS patient-care projects Operation Diabetes and Operation Immunization were selected for the awards from a pool of twenty-five schools of pharmacy. This marks the first time the School has won two awards at the regional meeting. The School also earned two awards at the 2011 APhA-ASP Annual Meeting for Operation Heart and Division A Chapter Achievement. “These … Read more
Vaughan Receives ASIS&T Career-Achievement Award
November 1, 2012The prestigious Watson Davis Award, presented each year by the American Society for Information Science & Technology, has been awarded to K.T. Vaughan, pharmacy librarian at UNC’s Health Sciences Library and adjunct professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. Established in 1975, the Watson Davis Award commemorates the memory and legacy of ASIS&T founder Watson Davis. It is given yearly to a single ASIS&T member who demonstrates outstanding continuous contributions and dedicated service to the Society. Vaughan has been an active member of ASIS&T since 1999 and has taken on many leadership roles. She received her master’s degree in library … Read more
PhD Student in Molecular Pharmaceutics Wins Brewington Award
October 31, 2012James Byrne, a PhD student at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, is the 2012 recipient of the School’s Kathryne A. Brewington Graduate Student Research Award. The award is given annually to the top student in the School’s PhD in pharmaceutical sciences program. The winner receives a plaque and a $1,500 research grant that can be used to fund research, travel to another institution to develop new research skills, or attend a national scientific meeting where the student will present his or her dissertation work. Byrne will use his Brewington grant to support device-efficacy studies in a novel mouse model … Read more
School Receives NACDS Grant for New Residency Site in Raleigh
October 15, 2012The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy has received a $50,000 grant from the National Association of Chain Drug Stores Foundation to establish a new PGY1 community pharmacy residency site in Raleigh, North Carolina. The School will use its grant to fund a new residency site at Kroger in Raleigh. The site’s preceptors are Jane DeVries, PharmD; Ouita Davis, RPh; Laura Cates, RPh; and Matt Smith, PharmD. The grant comes via the NACDS’s Community Pharmacy Residency Expansion Project, a $1.5 million program established in 2010 that seeks to create thirty new, fully accredited PGY1 community pharmacy residencies through grants to nonprofit schools … Read more
Roth, Jin Receive NIH Grant to Develop New Schizophrenia Drugs
September 17, 2012Two faculty members at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy are part of a multi-investigator team that has received a five-year, $7.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to create novel drugs for the treatment of schizophrenia and related disorders. Bryan Roth, PhD, MD, a Michael Hooker Distinguished Professor in the UNC School of Medicine and the pharmacy school, is one of the lead investigators on the grant. Jian Jin, PhD, an associate professor and the associate director of medicinal chemistry at the pharmacy school’s Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery, is the principal investigator for … Read more
Tropsha Awarded NSF Grant to Design Tools to Analyze Protein-Protein Interactions
August 14, 2012Alex Tropsha, PhD, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation worth almost $900,000 over three years to design novel approaches to analyzing protein-protein interactions. The interactions between proteins play a central role in all major signaling events that occur in living cells. However, many if not most pairs of interacting proteins remain unknown, and their discovery presents a key challenge for postgenomic biology, says Tropsha, the K.H. Lee Distinguished Professor in the School’s Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry. “We plan to create and deliver—ultimately in the form of user-friendly software—novel approaches to analyzing protein-protein interactions … Read more