UNC and Duke team up for clinical pharmacology training
As part of one of the few federally funded training programs in the field, graduate students and postdocs improve medications.
UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University may be rivals on the playing field, but they’re on the same team when it comes to clinical pharmacology research and training.
The UNC-Duke Collaborative Clinical Pharmacology T32 Postdoctoral Training Program, run through the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, is one example of collaboration between the two universities. The program creates opportunities for clinicians and postdoctoral scholars to conduct research alongside Carolina and Duke experts to improve the efficacy and safety of medications.
“It’s very collaborative. Although UNC and Duke may be rivals on the basketball court, when it comes to clinical pharmacology, we’re teammates,” said Kim Brouwer, lead principal investigator for the program and associate dean for research and graduate education at the school.
Funding for the program comes from the National Institutes of Health’s Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, known as the T32. The training program enables institutions to recruit individuals selected by them for predoctoral and postdoctoral research training in specified shortage areas.
“There are only a few NIH-funded training programs in clinical pharmacology across the U.S.,” said Brouwer. “Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars are the engine of our research programs.”
T32 trainees engage in research to understand individual variation in drug disposition and response to optimize medication use, or to develop new therapeutics, or to advance novel therapeutic approaches. Trainees investigate approaches to minimize toxicity and study how medications are handled by the body based on patient-specific factors such as genetics, disease and age. As part of this training program, a research adviser or mentor guides them with their research project.
This training program is in its 14th year and has up to eight trainees in the program per year.
“One of the things that was attractive to me about UNC was being part of this T32 fellowship,” said Patty Maglalang, program fellow and doctoral candidate. “It’s a nice collaboration because I’m still at UNC, but I’m able to get involved in professional development activities at Duke as well, interacting with clinicians and doctors that see pediatric patients. The goal of the program is to launch us to become independent investigators in our research fields.”
Maglalang’s research for her T32 fellowship and doctorate focuses on using mathematical modeling to optimize the safety and efficacy of medications in children, specifically medications that treat seizures and epilepsy.
“It’s great to generate information for pediatric populations, like neonates and infants, where there’s not a lot of dosing information out there,” said Maglalang. “The research helps fill in those gaps to questions that otherwise we wouldn’t be able to know the answer to.”
T32 trainees also take courses in the program, on topics like understanding the ethics of conducting human studies, learning about the processes of drug absorption, distribution and elimination, and ensuring the rigor and reproducibility of scientific data. They work on professional development skills as well, meeting with guest speakers in the field.
“We are trying to train clinician scientists who won’t just be physicians taking care of patients but will be involved in creating new treatments or the best combination of treatments using expertise they’re developing through the program,” said Paul Watkins, co-director of the program.
The best part of playing on the same team? Both universities benefit from this research through their different expertise, ranging from pharmacogenomics to drug disposition in various diseases in adult and pediatric patients.
“The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy has a great reputation. You can tell they support their students and want them to succeed,” said Maglalang. “Being a part of the program has been a tremendous opportunity.”
