Fn Faculty News
Faculty Grants 4
PostScript
Balaz, Mousa Awarded NIH Grants Stefan Balaz, Ph.D., Chair and Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences Vermont Campus, has been awarded a five year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the amount of $1,350,000.
these factors are particularly critical is in the development of cancer drugs.
Dr. Balaz and his team will develop an approach that will model how chemicals are transported and accumulate in biological membranes, helping researchers predict how new drug candidates are likely to behave in the body.
“Using this software, researchers will be able to predict the behavior of drugs, even before making a compound. For example, for a chemical that is to be injected close to a tumor, the software will indicate whether it will surround and fight the tumor or whether there are risks to other organs in the body,” said Dr. Balaz. “Our approach will be key to identifying the structure and properties responsible for a drug’s movement in the body and will propose how the molecules should be modified to achieve the desired distribution. This knowledge is extremely important in developing drugs that will effectively treat disease and minimize the adverse effects to the patient.”
The results of the research will be combined with modeling of protein binding and incorporated into software, tentatively called cell-QSAR. Once the software is available, researchers will need only sketch the drug’s structure to understand the rate at which it will be transported through the membranes of the body. The transport rate is critical to determining whether a drug will be distributed throughout the body or if it is more likely to remain close to the location where it was administered. Allowing researchers to model how potential new drugs will act in the body will decrease the time-tomarket for these drugs as well as the costs associated with research and development. One area where
Shaker A. Mousa, Ph.D., Executive Vice President and Chairman of the Pharmaceutical Research Institute (PRI) at ACPHS, received a $372,680 research grant from the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Mousa and a team of PRI investigators will use nanotechnology to explore new approaches for managing thyroid activity in patients suffering from breast cancer. “The continued evolution of nanotechnology is now allowing the scientific and medical communities to rethink what is possible in terms of treating patients and preventing disease,” said Dr. Mousa. “We expect that the results of our research will not only impact patients suffering from breast cancer, but those suffering from other forms of cancer as well.”