LIU Pharmacy’s faculty and students are hard at work on impactful research, making the most of opportunities generated by the University’s membership in an elite pharmacy research consortium. This consortium, the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Technology and Education (NIPTE), has seven top 10 schools in U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of college pharmacy programs among its membership, including the University of Minnesota, the University of Texas, and Purdue University.
One year after LIU joined NIPTE, two research grants received through the consortium have been expanded. These grants facilitate research in the University’s Lachman Institute for Pharmaceutical Analysis, an analytical laboratory equipped with advanced analytical instrumentation in support of pre-clinical drug development research, industrial drug development and pharmaceutical compounding activities.
Under one NIPTE grant, LIU Pharmacy faculty and students are studying how tablets dissolve in biorelevant media, or fluids that simulate what is found inside the human body. The goal is to determine and measure differences between dissolution in biorelevant media and dissolution in water (the standard method for testing solid dosage forms), improving the drug development process for drug manufacturers and outcomes for patients.
LIU Pharmacy is also working with researchers at the University of Iowa on a clinical study involving transdermal patches. LIU Pharmacy students and faculty are using mass spectrometry to determine the level of a drug in patients’ blood after they have worn a transdermal patch for a given length of time. Through the study, researchers at Iowa and LIU are examining how much the amount of drug in a patch varies between different manufacturers, and how much it varies among patches made by the same manufacturer.
LIU’s work in conjunction with researchers at Iowa is just one example of the opportunities that faculty and students have as a result of membership in NIPTE. As LIU Pharmacy continues to conduct research in its institutes – with and without NIPTE partners – the University is poised to become a top destination for elite pharmaceutical researchers and motivated graduate students.
