June 16, 2011
Bob Schuck, PharmD, a doctoral student at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has received a predoctoral fellowship from the American Heart Association to support his search for new treatments for vascular inflammation and cardiovascular disease.
The two-year fellowship will provide $23,000 per year for Schuck to study eicosanoids, signaling molecules that are metabolized by various enzyme pathways. Eicosanoids control inflammation, which plays an integral role in the development of numerous diseases and conditions, including cardiovascular disease.
Schuck is tackling the topic with a two-pronged approach — finding new treatments and identifying people who are most likely to benefit from those treatments. He is conducting experiments with genetically modified mice and pharmacological agents to find novel treatments for inflammation that may ultimately be used for patients with cardiovascular disease. He is also conducting human studies to determine whether genetics and circulating levels of eicosanoids in the blood predispose people to high levels of vascular inflammation.
“The goal of our human studies is to identify a subset of the population that is most likely to respond to the anti-inflammatory therapeutic strategies that we investigate in the lab,” says Schuck, who joined assistant professor Craig Lee’s lab in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics in fall 2008 after earning his doctor of pharmacy from the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy.
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