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ACPHS President’s Report 2009
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David P. DeMagistris, Ph.D. ’77 Senior Vice President, Pharmaceutical Sciences and Manufacturing Cerulean Pharma Inc. Cambridge, MA W h at h e ’ s w o r k ing o n >
DeMagistris works in the emerging field of nanopharmaceuticals, where he helps develop nanotechnology based drug delivery systems at Cerulean. Nanopharmaceuticals use ultra-small particles measured in nanometers (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter) to target the root causes of disease. These drug containing particles are designed
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to enhance treatment medications by delivering drugs to specific diseased tissues, controlling the release of therapeutic concentrations of drugs over a short or prolonged period of time, and improving formulations of established therapies. Cerulean has two nanotechnology platforms, one currently in clinical trials for oncology.
Nanopharmaceuticals have many applications, but one area of that offers great promise is in the treatment of cancer, which remains an area of high unmet medical need. Nanotechnology-based therapeutics have the
potential to be more effective and better tolerated by cancer patients than traditional treatments, resulting in improved outcomes and extended patient life without the harmful side effects often associated with cancer therapies.
Susan M. Learned, Pharm.D., Ph.D. ’91 Head of Discovery Medicine, North America Neurosciences Center of Excellence for Drug Discovery GlaxoSmithKline
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As a clinical pharmacologist, Learned leads a group of physicians and scientists that are responsible for studying every new neurology and psychiatry drug developed by GlaxoSmithKline. Through early clinical studies, her group works to identify the correct dosage of a new drug, ensuring its safety and tolerability. Once the
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safety and tolerability have been characterized, they design trials to test the efficacy of the drug for the target disease. A key objective of her group is to determine early in clinical development whether a compound is likely to be better than medicines already available on the market, helping to ensure that compounds that do
not have the proper profile are not progressed, while those that show significant promise receive the proper resources to enable further development. Her current areas of research include: depression, anxiety disorders, dementia and cognition, schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, sleep disorders, pain and addiction.
By the time a drug is available to the public, it has been tested in humans so that the product you take is effective, safe and at the correct dosage. The medicines that Learned’s group helps to develop address the significant need for better treatments of neurological and psychiatric diseases.