Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences Reserach

Every day, many cars pass by Leonard Hall on Fifth Avenue in Pocatello, with few people really realizing the cutting-edge research that’s occurring in the building that they just passed. And the same is true for our Meridian, ID and Anchorage, AK research facilities and labs as well. As academic researchers, our job is not to create therapies ourselves, but to do the basic work that eventually leads to a drug that might be used in a clinic. We publish and present research across the country and at national meetings. We try to make sure that the information that we get in our laboratories gets out into the scientific community, and they’re the ones who really take all the lead development that we do, and the new ideas for how we might approach therapies, and develop that into new treatments. This academic research is in some ways responsible for substantially reducing the cost of drug development.

In the Department of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, researchers have three main focus areas: cancer research, neuroscience research and drug delivery. For example, Dr. Jared Barrott studies a cancer called synovial sarcoma, which is a rare cancer in children. In his lab, he incorporates some very interesting approaches, like rapid sequencing of DNA from the cells and 3D bioprinting, and his is one of the few labs working on that. The 3D bioprinters are capable of printing most kinds of tissue and then he can test a variety of drugs to see how the tumor reacts.

Dr. Prabha Awale works in neuroscience, and she’s trying to understand how autism actually develops. Surprisingly, we don’t really know how autism develops in children, and her work focuses on that. She’s also using some very cutting-edge techniques like single cell tagging and DNA sequencing, which allows her to follow a single cell as it develops in the brain. She