June 9, 2011
Liz Pempe, a doctoral student at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has won a predoctoral fellowship award from the American Heart Association to support her study of the blood-thinner heparin.
The fellowship will provide $23,000 per year for two years to support Pempe’s research to determine which structural features of the heparin molecule control the drug’s half-life — the rate at which the drug is eliminated from the body. Heparin is the world’s most widely used anticoagulant drug, with annual sales estimated at $3 billion. It is used for a variety of applications, such as preventing clotting during surgery, treating thrombosis, and lining medical tubing.
“The different uses of heparin require different drug half-lives,” says Pempe, who is in professor Jian Liu’s lab in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products. “For example, the anticoagulant effect should be stopped quickly after surgery, but the effect should be prolonged when used to treat a patient with deep vein thrombosis.
“Unfortunately, there is no systematic approach to controlling the clearance rate of heparin.”
Pempe is looking for a way to control that clearance rate. Heparin has a highly variable molecular structure, and figuring out which elements of that structure control the drug’s binding to the heparin clearance receptor and elimination from the body could help researchers develop synthetic heparin drugs with different half-lives that are specifically tailored to different medical applications, she says.
Pempe says developing new synthetic heparin that is safe and effective is important because the three main types of heparin drugs currently in use all have their limitations, including being difficult to produce, being prone to contamination, or causing harmful side effects such as bleeding.
“There is a critical need for a new generation of heparin drugs that can treat different thrombotic disorders with reduced bleeding effects,” she says.
Latest News
Dean Angela Kashuba receives Carolina Alumni Faculty Service Award
RASP poster presentations capture student research
