October 1, 2009
A paper coauthored by Gary Pollack, PhD, has been selected by the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists for the 2009 AAPS Pharmaceutical Research Meritorious Manuscript Award.
The paper, “Kinetic Considerations for the Quantitative Assessment of Efflux Activity and Inhibition: Implications for Understanding and Predicting the Effects of Efflux Inhibition,” proposed a new way of analyzing data from experiments that examine how drugs move through the body.
“In the old days, we used to believe drugs moved passively through the body, diffusing from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration,” Pollack says. “Now we know that proteins play an active role in transporting drug molecules. However, the methods we were using analyze data related to movement, or flux, were rigid and standardized and, we believed, wrong.”
Pollack credits his coauthor, John Corey Kalvass, PhD, a former graduate student in Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics who now works for Eli Lilly, with developing the new mathematical model that more accurately describes drug movement, or flux.
“What we were saying in this paper flew in the face of established practice. We were telling very distinguished scientists that they were wrong,” Pollack says. “This award is gratifying because it was such a big jump from proposing the idea to having it accepted and, finally, to best paper.”
Pollack is the executive associate dean of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy.
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