USP Announces Winners of Global Fellowship Awards

On Dec. 8, 2015, the United States Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) announced the recipients of the 2015–2016 Global Fellowship Awards. The recipients include PhD candidates from the University of Washington, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Kentucky Research Foundation.

The recipient’s research involves identification and characterization of drugs and excipients by chemical structure elucidation, improving molecular weight analysis of Heparin, and improving analytical methods for USP monographs. The PhD students will each receive $30,000 to conduct research at their university.

The 2015–2016 USP Global Fellowship Award recipients are as follows:

Kelly M. Hines, PhD, senior fellow in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Washington

Area of research: Ion mobility–mass spectrometry (IM–MS) as an orthogonal technique for the identification and characterization of drugs and excipients by structure

This project aims at implementing IM–MS as a high throughput screening strategy to screen standards of approximately 2000 drug compounds available from the University of Washington and create a database of measurements for known drugs. The IM–MS-based methodology could serve as a benchmark for dietary supplements and biologics identification and characterization. Dr. Hines’ research at University of Washington is led by Dr. Libin Xu and her USP mentor for this project is Shankari Shivaprasad, scientific liaison with USP’s Chemical Medicines Department.

Katelyn Arnold, PhD candidate, Department of Biology and Medicinal Chemistry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Area of research: Improving molecular weight analysis of heparin and low molecular weight heparins

Katelyn’s research focuses on improving the quality control of heparin drugs and is led by Dr. Jian Lu at University of Carolina at Chapel Hill. Under the mentorship of USP Global Biologics’ scientific liaison Anita Szajek, Katelyn’s project will use novel methods developed at Dr. Liu’s glycobiology laboratory to synthetize a set of oligosaccharide reference standards. These reference standards will be used to examine the resolution of the current quality test method to potentially allow for a more stringent quality test and accurate detection of larger heparins that have been related to an increased risk of heparin-induced thrombocytopenia, a hazardous side-effect connected to heparins with a larger molecular weight.

Julie L. Calahan, PhD candidate, Department of Pharmaceutical Science at University of Kentucky Research Foundation

Area of research: Improvement of analytical methods for USP monographs

The research is led by Dr. Eric J. Munson at University of Kentucky and mentored at USP by scientific liaisons Hong Wang and Galina Holloway in the Excipients department. Julie will be developing improved analytical methods for USP’s excipient monographs, including the nanotechnology-derived excipients, excipients prone to adulteration, and naturally derived macromolecular excipients. The research also aims at identifying future analytical techniques that can be used as potential replacements for monographs.

Source: USP