November 12, 2013
- IPIT drops “institute” in favor of “center” to become CPIT
- Tim Wiltshire is the new director. Federico Innocenti is the associate director.
- CPIT pursues genetic research aimed at getting patients the best results from medicines.
Tim Wiltshire, PhD, has been named director of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s Center for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Federico Innocenti, MD, PhD, will serve as associate director.
Wiltshire succeeds Howard McLeod, PharmD, who is now medical director at the DeBartolo Family Personalized Medicine Institute at the University of South Florida Moffitt Cancer Center. Wiltshire and Innocenti are associate professors in the School’s Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics.
New Emphasis
Wiltshire says he envisions a new focus and opportunity for the center, which explores ways of using a patient’s genetic information to make optimal medication choices that increase the effectiveness and minimize potential side effects of drugs.
“I think it is very important to bring pharmacogenomics to North Carolina,” he says. “What we haven’t done well in pharmacogenomics is implementing what we already know. What I would like to see is the health-care field aware of the pharmacogenomics research we do so that they can best use it in practice.”
Wiltshire points out that there are more than one hundred drugs listed by the Food and Drug Administration that have genetic information associated with them and says that very little of this information is currently being used to make patient treatment decisions. Physicians, and especially patients, do not fully appreciate the value and relevance of the info, and the needed genetic tests can be expensive. We can do a lot more to make our partners and patients aware of the benefits of pharmacogenomics.
“When you come into the hospital, your blood type is checked. It’s standard procedure,” Wiltshire says. “What if we also administered one genetic test for all actionable items at the same time? The test would be a lot cheaper, and while you may not need one of those hundred drugs now, there’s enough of a chance that you would in the future to make it worth doing.
“We need to change the way we test, to reduce costs. Then the question for the clinician becomes not ‘Should I get the test done,’ but rather ‘The test got done; how should I use the information?’ The challenge then becomes educating practitioner as to how the information can and should be used.”
New Name
The center was formerly known as the Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized therapy. “Institute” is being dropped in favor of “center.” This change brings the unit in line with the naming conventions used for the Schools two other research centers.
More than twenty scientists are members of the center. CPIT is a collaboration of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, UNC School of Medicine, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, and UNC School of Nursing, with substantial support from the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences.
Tim Wiltshire
Wiltshire joined the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy in 2007 as IPIT’s associate director and as an associate professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics. He also holds adjunct faculty positions in the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and in the Department of Genetics at the UNC School of Medicine.
Wiltshire taught high school science in New Zealand for eleven years before deciding to make a career change. He earned a PhD in biochemistry and cell and molecular biology at the University of Tennessee and went on to postdoctoral research positions at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania. Wiltshire then joined the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation as a scientist and over eight years became a senior research investigator there.
At Novartis, Wiltshire worked to identify new drug targets for the Novartis drug discovery pipeline using mouse models of disease, genetics, and genomics and a focus on developing resources, such as SNPs, gene expression, and genetic analysis methods.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, Wiltshire studies drug reactions using mouse models with different genetic makeups. His current focus is on anxiety and depression and the medications used to treat them. His work is supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.
Federico Innocenti
Innocenti obtained his MD from the University of Pisa in Italy and completed residencies in clinical pharmacology and oncology. He has a PhD in pharmacology, toxicology, and chemotherapy. He joined UNC in January 2011 after twelve years of research in cancer pharmacogenomics at the University of Chicago, where he also directed the pharmacology course for the Pritzker School of Medicine for seven years. Innocenti holds appointments in the UNC School of Medicine and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
His NIH-funded research program currently focuses on the discovery of genomic determinants of efficacy and toxicity of cancer chemotherapy, integrating clinical genomic investigation with functional evaluation of gene variation.
Innocenti is the principal investigator of numerous pharmacogenomic studies within the Alliance of Clinical Trials in Oncology (previously Cancer and Leukemia Group B), where he serves as the chair of the Gastrointestinal Solid Tumor Correlative Science Group. He is the chair of the oncology section of the American Society of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in the field of cancer pharmacology and pharmacogenomics and holds a patent on the use of the UGT1A1 genetic test.
Latest News
RASP poster presentations capture student research
Delesha Carpenter promoted to full professor
