Former Medicinal Chemistry postdoctoral fellow Klarissa Hardy has received a 2014 New Investigator Award from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP). Klarissa, now an Assistant Professor at Lipscomb University College of Pharmacy in Nashville, TN, was one of 17 award recipients for 2014. The New Investigator program provides start-up funding for new pharmacy faculty’s research programs. The awards are given to individual faculty starting their academic careers at ACPE-accredited colleges or universities in the U.S. Klarissa will receive $10,000 for her research project “Molecular Mechanisms of Drug-Induced Liver Injury by Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors” as well as a travel award so she may present her findings at the AACP annual meeting in 2015.
“I am very pleased for Klarissa to have achieved this success so early in her faculty career,” said Dr. Allan Rettie, Chair of Medicinal Chemistry. “It is very well deserved.”
Klarissa was part of the late Dr. Sid Nelson’s lab at Med Chem, where she studied the targeted breast cancer drug, lapatinib, to examine the role of cytochrome P450-mediated metabolic activation in the liver toxicity associated with lapatinib. “My current work continues along these lines,” she said, “and is focused on two additional anti-cancer tyrosine kinase inhibitors — pazopanib and sunitinib — which have both been associated with hepatotoxicity.” The goal is to characterize the metabolism and bioactivation pathways of pazopanib and sunitinib to provide insight into the biochemical mechanisms of hepatotoxicity.
“I am excited and thankful to God for the opportunity to receive this award,” added Klarissa, “and I see it as an encouraging start to my career. I also thank my excellent mentors, Sid Nelson and Allan Rettie, who supported my postdoctoral training at UW to make this possible.”
Congratulations to Dr. Klarissa Hardy on this well-deserved award!