The UWSOP Faculty Innovation Award provides financial support of up to $20,000 each for high-risk, innovative research projects. The reviewers look for projects with high scientific merit and great potential to generate extramural funding. This year, four UWSOP faculty were honored with this award.
Qingxin Mu, Acting Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutics, has been selected for his proposal titled, Drug Combination Nanoparticle-Enhanced Chemo-Immuno Therapy of Metastatic Breast Cancer.
A long-term goal of Mu’s research is to develop advanced and well-understood drug delivery approaches that enhance current and future single drug therapy and drug combination therapy of metastatic cancers.
Yvonne Lin ’02, Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutics, has been selected for her proposal titled, Assessing the Drug Interaction Potential of Postbiotic Supplementation.
Research has shown that the microbiome plays a vital role in metabolism, health, and disease. Consumers are increasingly interested in dietary supplements, such as probiotics, prebiotics and postbiotics, that supposedly support digestive system health in addition to other uses.
Little is known about how these “biotics” products affect the metabolism of other drugs, like Tylenol, when taken at the same time. Lin hopes that this research will lead to a better understanding of how these supplements influence drug effectiveness in the body during all stages of life from newborn to the elderly.
Brian Werth, Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacy, has been selected for his proposal titled, Long-acting Lipoglycopeptide Cross-Resistance Potential in Colonizing Opportunistic Pathogens.
For Werth, this funding will facilitate a pivot from testing the target pathogens like MRSA, toward studying other opportunistic pathogens that live on human skin and in intestines and examining the effects of long-lasting antibiotics on other pathogens.
Abhinav Nath ’08, Associate Professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, has been selected for his proposal titled, Discovering Modulators of Self-Assembly and Aggregation by the ALS-linked Protein TDP-43.
Nath and his group are developing new and powerful methods to characterize and control protein dynamics, building on recent advances in biophysics, biochemistry, and pharmacology from groups around the world.
“My lab studies the formation of toxic protein aggregates, a hallmark of major incurable neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also called Lou Gehrig’s disease,” Nath said.