Katelyn Arnold, a Ph.D. candidate in the Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has been awarded a $25,000 predoctoral U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention Global Fellowship for the second year in a row.
The fellowship award, which is highly competitive and rarely goes to the same recipient twice, aims to advance new research contributing to innovative or updated quality standards for chemical and biological medicines, excipients, dietary supplements, herbal medicines, health-care quality and food ingredients.
Arnold works in the lab of her adviser, McNeill Distinguished Professor Jian Liu, Ph.D., where she focuses on synthetic heparin molecular-weight reference standards for potential use in heparin quality tests.
The goal of Arnold’s research is to use methods developed in Liu’s laboratory to create heparin oligosaccharide reference standards. With help from collaborators Stephen Capuzzi and Eugene Muratov in Tropsha’s lab, she has developed a predictive computational model to facilitate this analysis. Liu said Arnold’s work is the first successful example of a graduate student designing and implementing a multidisciplinary project and called it an excellent model with which to train graduate students. She is also collaborating with the lab of Alex Tropsha, Ph.D., K.H. Lee Distinguished Professor and associate dean for pharmacoinformatics and data science.
As a second-year fellowship recipient, Arnold traveled to the USP headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, in January 2017 to present the progress made during last year’s fellowship, to receive the current fellowship and to review the proposed research plan with USP staff. She will return next year to present her final research findings.
“I feel incredibly fortunate to have received support for a second year for this project,” Arnold said. “The mentorship component of this fellowship is unique, and I am very grateful to be in direct communication with experts in this field.”
This year, the researchers are proposing a novel method for enoxaparin sodium molecular weight determination that couples synthetic oligosaccharide standards with the power of predictive computational modeling. This reference standard package can allow for a more stringent quality test while simplifying user analysis and subjectivity.
Arnold said that with USP support, the result of this work could yield a new class of molecular weight standards for heparin manufacturers.