NEW ORLEANS, LA (November 15, 2010) � The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) is pleased to announce its 2010 AAPS Fellows. An individual is granted the honor of being named AAPS Fellow after making sustained remarkable scholarly and research contributions to the pharmaceutical sciences such as original articles, scientific presentations at AAPS Annual Meetings, and/or patents.
Joseph P. Balthasar, Ph.D. is Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, and serves as director of their Center for Protein Therapeutics, which utilizes pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic analyses to guide the development of new therapies. His current research focuses on the development of drug targeting strategies to improve the selectivity of cancer chemotherapy and on the development of new immunotherapies for the treatment of humoral autoimmune diseases.
Reina Bendayan, Pharm.D. is Associate Dean and a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Toronto. She has made significant contributions to the field of anti-HIV drug distribution in several compartments of the brain. Her group was one of the first to demonstrate that specific proteins localized in the brain can play a significant role in the permeability of these drugs at primary sites of infection in the Central Nervous System and contribute to antiviral drug resistance.
Panayiotis Constantinides, Ph.D. is the Founder and Principal of Biopharmaceutical & Drug Delivery Consulting, LLC. He has more than 20 years of experience in pharmaceutical research and development with diverse molecules, delivery technologies, and disease indications that span from start-up companies to multinational pharmaceutical organizations. He has made significant contributions in the areas of drug delivery and formulation development of small molecules and macromolecules particularly with lipid-based drug delivery systems, advancing many NMEs to clinical studies and reformulating marketed drugs. He is Past-Chair of the AAPS Lipid-Based Drug Delivery Systems Focus Group and the current Chair of the Nanotechnology Focus Group.
Natalie D. Eddington, Ph.D. is Dean of the University of Maryland, School of Pharmacy. She is a nationally recognized expert in drug delivery and pharmacokinetics. Her research focuses on cancer therapy and treatments for disorders of the Central Nervous System. In her previous role as chair of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Department, she guided the launch of the Center for Nanomedicine and Cellular Delivery, which brings together a collection of scientists to find new and better ways of providing pharmaceutical treatment.
William F. Elmquist, Ph.D. is a professor in the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy. The research performed by his group is designed to find better ways to deliver drugs to the brain. Many diseases in the brain are hard to treat because possibly effective drugs do not reach the site of disease. With this in mind, new treatment strategies are being explored to treat invasive brain tumors, a deadly disease in the brain that currently has no effective treatment. If successful, knowledge obtained from this research can be applied to other diseases in the brain, such as psychiatric disorders, epilepsy, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's.
Isadore Kanfer, Ph.D. is Emeritus Dean and Professor of Pharmacy at Rhodes University. His main research interests involve the quality, safety, and efficacy of medicines, in particular bioavailability and bioequivalence of pharmaceutical dosage forms. He has been focusing on the development of methods for the bioequivalence assessment of topical dermatological dosage forms where the drug is not intended to be absorbed into the systemic circulation. Other areas of research include the regulation of complementary and traditional medicines, development and validation of assays for use in control/quality assurance and bioassays for the quantitative determination of drugs in biological fluids, formulation and dissolution, biopharmaceutics, and pharmacokinetics. He has contributed to over 200 research publications and conference presentations, and is co-editor of four books in the series Generic Drug Product Development.
Peter R. Langguth, Ph.D. is Professor of Pharmaceutical Technology and Biopharmacy at the School of Pharmacy, Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany. He has made significant research contributions in the area of drug transport, absorption, and bioavailability, in particular from the gastrointestinal tract, pharmacokinetics, and in vitro/in vivo correlations. Dr. Langguth has published over 100 journal articles, more than 130 abstracts, and is on the editorial board of several journals.
Clause-Michael Lehr, Ph.D. is a professor at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland, and Saarland University. His research explores biological barriers, in particular the gastrointestinal tract, the skin, and the lungs; additionally, he has developed drug carrier systems capable of crossing these epithelial barriers and delivering active molecules to their targets. He has made important contributions to the development of young scientists and the organization of conferences and workshops, including as the coordinator of the European research training network GALENOS, and its Euro-Ph.D. program.
Xiaoling Li, Ph.D. is Professor of Pharmaceutics and Associate Dean at the Thomas J. Long School of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, University of the Pacific. He is a leading scientist in buccal and sublingual drug delivery. Dr. Li�s current research interests are focused on drug transport across the biological membranes and integrin targeted drug delivery for anticancer therapy. He has published three books, more than 70 papers, and over 120 abstracts.
Ram I. Mahato, Ph.D. is a professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. His research has provided unique insight into the design of gene delivery and expression systems, factors influencing their biodistribution and gene expression or silencing, role of genetic modification of human islets for improved transplantation, and site-specific delivery of oligonucleotides and siRNA for treating liver fibrosis and cancer. As Feature Editor of Pharmaceutical Research, he has engaged top leaders in the pharmaceutical sciences to contribute authoritative themed research sections on drug delivery, biomaterials, nucleic acid delivery, and bioimaging to the journal.
Srikumaran K. Melethil, Ph.D., J.D. is President and CEO of Law and Science Consulting. He has made outstanding contributions to the areas of pharmacokinetics and drug transport, as well as promoting the understanding of patent law to pharmaceutical scientists. His original scientific contributions have lead to a clear understanding of the mechanisms of dose-dependent disposition of aluminum kinetics and its hepatic toxicity.
Raymond Miller, D.Sc. is Executive Director, Modeling and Simulation, at Daiichi Sankyo Pharma Development. His research involves explaining the relationship between the administration of drugs and the responses obtained both for efficacy and safety. This information is used to improve the treatment of patients, as well as design new studies in an optimal way. Understanding these relationships as well as the uncertainty in them is crucial in drug development decision making. He has contributed to the application and dissemination of these concepts while in academia, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry.
Derek O�Hagan, Ph.D. is currently the Global Head of Vaccine Delivery Research for Novartis Vaccines. He has worked on improved vaccine delivery systems since 1993, and has worked on several concepts that moved into clinical evaluation, as improved delivery systems for vaccines, including mucosal vaccines, to avoid the need to administer vaccines by injection. He is the author of over 120 original research publications and is inventor on over 50 filed patents.
Bernard Olsen, Ph.D. is a consultant at Olsen Pharmaceutical Consulting. Over his 30-year career, he has supported the development or manufacture of 25 commercial drugs and numerous developmental drugs. In particular, he is an expert in the analysis of drugs to determine their quality. He has developed many procedures and novel approaches to aid in reducing drug impurities, and for use in quality control. He also demonstrated how rapid measurement techniques could be used to detect and combat counterfeit drugs.
Eric B. Sheinin, Ph.D. is President of Sheinin & Associates LLC, a consulting firm to the pharmaceutical industry. He is recognized for his contributions to the maintenance of the quality of pharmaceutical products marketed in the United States, as well as in other regions of the world. Dr. Sheinin worked at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for 30 years, and then at the United States Pharmacopeial Convention, Inc. for six years.
Steven J. Swanson, Ph.D. is head of Clinical Immunology at Amgen, and has focused his career on developing new tests to provide a better understanding of whether biological therapeutics cause patients to develop antibodies that would prevent these new drugs from working appropriately. He has made major scientific contributions to the understanding of the immunogenicity of therapeutic proteins, a major safety concern for biotherapeutics. This includes pioneer work using new technologies to detect and characterize antibodies that develop after administration of therapeutic proteins, using the results from these technologies to better understand the immune response, and leading the industry effort to standardize immunogenicity testing.
Elizabeth M. Topp, Ph.D. is Dane O. Kildsig Chair and Head of the Department of Industrial and Physical Pharmacy Department at Purdue University. She and her group are working to understand the mechanisms by which protein drugs degrade and developing new methods to stabilize these important drugs. Protein drugs are one of the fastest growing drug classes. They offer promising new treatments for previously intractable diseases, including cancers, infectious disease, autoimmune disorders, and cardiovascular disease.
Chang-Guo Zhan, Ph.D. is Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the College of Pharmacy, University of Kentucky, and is an internationally-recognized scientist in modern drug design and discovery. He has developed unique computational drug design approaches that have been proven reliable and efficient in the rational design of therapeutic candidates. For a particular application of his computational drug design approaches, his research team has successfully designed and discovered highly efficient cocaine hydrolases that are recognized as novel, promising therapeutic candidates for treatment of cocaine overdose.
About AAPS
The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) is a professional, scientific society of approximately 12,000 members employed in academia, industry, government and other research institutes worldwide. Founded in 1986, AAPS provides a dynamic international forum for the exchange of knowledge among scientists to enhance their contributions to health. AAPS offers timely scientific programs, on-going education, information resources, and opportunities for networking and professional development. To learn more about AAPS, please visit www.aapspharmaceutica.com.
Editors Note: To request an interview with or photograph of a 2010 Fellow, please contact Joe Catapano at CatapanoJ@aaps.org, or on-site at the 2010 International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) Pharmaceutical Sciences World Congress in association with the AAPS Annual Meeting and Exposition Press Room, located in Room 226 of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, at 504-670-6102. Copies of the 2010 Awards Program are also available for media use.