College of Pharmacy News

The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) has released its grant research funding awards for the upcoming year. All three awarded research projects at The University of Texas at Austin involve College of Pharmacy faculty.

The College of Pharmacy’s Pharmaceutical Engineering and 3D Printing (PharmE3D) Labs recently earned a three-year $1.5 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 grant to research novel manufacturing technology for complex vaccine formulations for influenza and other emerging infectious diseases.

The University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy moved up in several research funding categories, as reported in the newly-released rankings from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP). The college rose to #8 nationally in total research funding during the 2019-2020 fiscal year, compared to #9 in 2018-2019.

The UT College of Pharmacy’s Pharmaceutical Engineering and 3D Printing (PharmE3D) Lab earned a Texas Global Faculty Research Seed Grant for its work on patient-specific treatment of COVID-19.

Three researchers from the College of Pharmacy won an award from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) Foundation. Leticia R. Moczygemba, Pharm.D., Ph.D., Carolyn M. Brown, Ph.D. and Michael Johnsrud, Ph.D., R.Ph. were awarded $5,000 from the PhRMA Foundation for their proposal to advance racial and ethnic representation in value assessments.

Student pharmacist Johana Suh earned an undergraduate fellowship award for research on 3D bioprinted modeling of the neurodegenerative disease NPC-1, or Niemann-Pick disease type C1. Suh is a second-year Doctor of Pharmacy candidate in the UT College of Pharmacy, and serves as an undergraduate researcher in the Pharmaceutical Engineering and 3D Printing (PharmE3D) Labs led by Mo Maniruzzaman, Ph.D.

Researchers in the lab of Dr. Hugh D.C. Smyth have released promising results of a new method to treat SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The antiviral niclosamide, when incorporated with human lysozyme as a carrier molecule, shows potential as an effective COVID-19 treatment when delivered directly to the airways.

Live subject testing results from the Williams Lab show that dry powder inhalation could be a potent and effective delivery method of the antiviral remdesivir to treat patients affected by COVID-19.

Assistant Professor Mo Maniruzzaman’s Pharmaceutical Engineering and 3D Printing (PharmE3D) labs have entered an agreement with UK-based CoM3D to develop digital 3D drug manufacturing and advanced drug delivery systems.

To meet the need to develop methods to make drugs more soluble and usable, the Maniruzzaman Lab teamed up with Advanced Material Development (AMD) to address challenges with the reduction in quantity of new drugs coming to market.