At the college’s annual Graduate Studies Celebration, held March 14 in conjunction with Research Day, nine students received awards for their hard work and dedication as master’s and PhD students in the College of Pharmacy, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences.

“It’s such an honour,” said Jenna-Julie Esteban, who received the Leslie F. Buggey Graduate Scholarship in Pharmacy. This prestigious award is presented to a dedicated student who has achieved a minimum GPA average of 3.5 in the last two years of their previous program of student.

Maintaining this level of academic excellence is a challenge at any time, but in addition to being a hardworking master’s student, Esteban is also a new mother. “The support I’ve received at the College of Pharmacy has been incredible,” she said. “I’ve come such a long way and it’s been such a great experience.”

The event also provided the opportunity for graduate students to give 3 Minute Thesis-style presentations. Master’s student Danish Malhotra, who was awarded a College of Pharmacy M.Sc. Endowment Stipend, gave an overview of his poster, “Neutralizing Interleukin (IL)-1β Reduces Formation of Islet Amyloid Polypeptide Aggregates in Human Islets during Ex Vivo Culturentations.”

With a steady voice, Malhotra took the audience through complex information with simple but effective infographics. As he ended his speech, he gave a special call-out to supervisor Dr. Lucy Marzban. “I am so thankful for her support,” he said. “I am an international student from India and every day I am grateful to be here and for all the opportunities I have had.”

For Malhotra, the key is careful planning and always keeping his eyes on the prize. “I plan my day each day, I think everything through, and I work as hard as anyone can!”

The day also included a keynote presentation by Dr. Daniel Mueller, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).

Mueller, who is also head of the Pharmacogenetics Research Clinic at CAMH, is responsible for the development of the first pharmacogenetic testing service for patients with psychiatric conditions in Canada.

Dr. Anna Chudyk delivered the faculty keynote on patient engagement as part of her research practice, providing insight into ways to bring lived experience of patients to inform her work.

Chudyk is not only an assistant professor within the college, but is also a podcaster with a regular program called Podcast: asPERusual, which encourages researchers to include patients and caregivers as a key part of their research teams to get the fullest picture possible.

“I’m extremely happy to win this prestigious award,” she said. “It’s an achievement.”

Research Day, which took place earlier this month, gave participants the opportunity to show off the projects they’ve been working tirelessly on. Aboulatta was one of four learners who took part in the invited oral presentation, and 18 participants in the poster competition.

Aboulatta, who received her doctor of pharmacy from Alexandria University in Egypt, is examining the impact that COVID-19 measures and restrictions in Manitoba had on pregnant individuals and perinatal care. She’s working to determine whether adverse perinatal outcomes, like preterm births and stillbirths, can be caused by factors exaggerated by the pandemic measures – like stress, anxiety and socioeconomic factors.

“The actual causes of preterm births and stillbirths have puzzled researchers for decades,” she said. “With the measures that took place during the pandemic, it gives us an opportunity to dig more and find the real causes.”

Aboulatta’s advisors are College of Pharmacy assistant professors Dr. Sherif Eltonsy and Dr. Kaarina Kowalec.

Dr. Luis Perez Davalos won the poster competition at the College of Pharmacy’s Research Day.

For College of Pharmacy master’s student Dr. Luis Perez Davalos, winning the poster competition was unexpected.

“I was trying to really tell a story that portrayed the work we’re doing,” he said. “It went well, and that led to winning the award. I wasn’t aiming for that.”

What Perez Davalos is aiming at is the development of a placenta-on-a-chip model to test nanodrugs to treat preeclampsia, a high blood pressure disorder that can occur during pregnancy. Perez Davalos, who received his medical degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, is working to replicate the conditions that happen in preeclampsia in the placenta, but on a chip.

“By creating a placenta-on-a-chip it will possibly accelerate the development of an intervention and instead of taking us 15 years to develop a new drug, maybe we can do it in a third of the time,” he said.

Perez Davalos’ advisor is Dr. Hagar Labouta, an assistant professor at the College of Pharmacy.

“I wish to congratulate the winners of the College of Pharmacy Research Day Presentation competition,” said Kowalec, who chaired Research Day and helped organize the event. “I would also like to say a warm congratulations to all the students, trainees and postdocs who contributed to an engaging and high level of scholarship during the day’s presentations.”

Research Day was combined with the College of Pharmacy’s annual graduate studies celebration and the Morris D. Faiman Lectureship. Dr. Christine Allen, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, gave the lecture on the technological approaches to accelerate development of advanced drug delivery strategies. Allen is an expert in drug formulation and the co-founder of Nanovista Inc., a company focused on high-precision, image-guided cancer therapy.

“Our results can directly impact patient care,” says Courtney Lawrence, a PhD student who is also a practising pharmacist. “It feels rewarding to participate in a study that’s aimed at improving the quality of life of dialysis patients.”

At the annual Research Day, held virtually on April 6, Lawrence presented findings from a current UM study funded by the Kidney Foundation of Canada. She is a co-investigator for the project led by pharmacy professor Dr. Sheryl Zelenitsky, her PhD advisor.

Their study focuses on optimizing antibiotic dosing for patients receiving hemodialysis for kidney disease. Although these patients are at high risk for serious infections, there has been very little research on appropriate antibiotic dosing for them.

“Currently, everybody gets the same dose, regardless of important factors like body weight and residual renal function,” Lawrence says.

Lawrence is analyzing the levels of two prescribed antibiotics in pre- and post-dialysis blood samples from study participants. Her presentation focused on the drug cefazolin. She and Zelenitsky found that the current recommended dose may result in below-target levels of the drug in nearly one-third of patients.

“Our goal is to develop new, evidence-based dosing recommendations,” Lawrence says.

The award winner for the best poster presentation was Donica Janzen, a PhD candidate and pharmacist whose supervisor is Dr. Silvia Alessi-Severini. Their study used linked, anonymized health data to compare patients with psychotic disorders who were prescribed different medications.

They found that drugs known as “second generation long-acting injectable antipsychotics” reduced the risk of treatment failure, incarceration and treatment discontinuation in patients by about 30 per cent compared with the other antipsychotic drugs that were studied. However, they found no significant difference in psychiatric hospitalization.

The keynote address at Pharmacy Research Day also highlighted how anonymized health databases can be mined to study “real-world” drug effects in large populations.

“It’s a very cool resource,” said the speaker, Dr. Helen Tremlett, professor of neurology at the University of British Columbia and Canada Research Chair in neuroepidemiology and multiple sclerosis (MS).

Tremlett’s team recently published studies that used anonymized health data to show that current drugs for MS were associated with a 23 per cent lower risk of hospitalization, compared with taking no drug. But the drugs did not show this benefit in patients over the age of 55.

Tremlett has also used data to look back in time and trace health-system use in the “prodromal period” – the years before a patient reports classical MS symptoms and is diagnosed with the disease.

By analyzing data for people with MS and comparing them with matched controls, Tremlett’s team found that those with MS had significantly higher health-care use in the five years leading up to the onset of MS. These patients were seeking help for a wide range of health issues, such as depression, digestive and urological problems, headaches and sleep disturbances.

Notably, in the year preceding MS onset, patients had 78 per cent more hospital visits, 88 per cent more physician service use and 49 per cent more prescriptions filled than the matched controls.

This evidence of an “MS prodrome” points to exciting potential to identify people whose symptoms and risk factors indicate that they are at high risk for the disease, Tremlett said. As “neuroprotective” drugs are developed in the future, such patients could be offered enrolment in clinical trials.

“Maybe we could recognize MS earlier,” she said. “Maybe we could intervene earlier and prevent disability.”