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Manish Kumar Madasu, Ph.D., postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Clinical Pharmacology, was the recent recipient of the Toni Shippenberg Young Investigator Award during the KappaCon 2021 Kappa Therapeutics Conference.

The paper highlights a newly discovered molecule with the potential to provide analgesic pain relief with fewer side effects and less addictive properties than opioids. Majumdar and Che’s research team has been studying the molecule to determine its orientation and how it binds to opioid receptors.

On Tuesday, February 23, 2021, the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis Board of Trustees marked an important moment in the University’s history with the announcement of its fifth president. David D. Allen, R.Ph., Ph.D., FASHP, FNAP, FAPhA, will serve as the University’s next president, with his tenure beginning on July 1, 2021. Allen will succeed John A. Pieper, Pharm.D., FCCP, FAPhA, FFIP, who has served as the University’s president since August 1, 2010. Pieper announced his retirement in April 2020 and will continue to serve as president until June 30, 2021.

Drs. Susruta Majumdar and Abdelfattah Faouzi recently co-published a paper in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry highlighting their work to uncover a compound that could play a key role in the future development of alternative therapeutics for pain management.

TLX is an orphan nuclear receptor that plays important roles in neurogenesis, vision, and cancer. Griffett et al. found that both natural and synthetic retinoids bind directly to TLX and regulate its transcriptional activity. Retinaldehyde, an important visual pigment, is the preferential natural retinoid ligand for TLX.

Dr. Alex Evers, Washington University School of Medicine’s Henry S. Mallinckrodt Professor of Anesthesiology and Professor of Developmental Biology [Pharmacology] and Internal Medicine, has accepted the role of interim director of the CCP effective November 9, 2020. During his tenure as Head of the Anesthesiology Department at Washington University, he was a founder of CCP and contributed much to its many ongoing successes. As such he is fully committed to the Center’s continued vibrancy and growth.

University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis has moved a 500 megahertz (MHz) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis to the Academic and Research Building (ARB).

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) affects a significant number of people worldwide and currently there are no pharmacological treatments. NAFLD often presents with obesity, insulin resistance, and in some cases cardiovascular diseases. There is a clear need for treatment options to alleviate this disease since it often progresses to much more the much more severe non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). The REV-ERB nuclear receptor is a transcriptional repressor that regulates physiological processes involved in the development of NAFLD including lipogenesis and inflammation. We hypothesized that pharmacologically activating REV-ERB would suppress the progression of fatty liver in a mouse model of NASH. Using REV-ERB agonist SR9009 in a mouse NASH model, we demonstrate the beneficial effects of REV-ERB activation that led to an overall improvement of hepatic health by suppressing hepatic fibrosis and inflammatory response.

Dr. Majumdar recently received a $100,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop compounds to treat neuropathic pain. 

The goal for Dr. McCall’s R01 grant is to better understand how chronic stress modifies the ability of central norepinephrine system, an important source of endogenous analgesia, to increase or decrease control of pain. Psychological stress can either suppress or enhance pain, but it is not well understood how this switch occurs. Most evidence suggests that the type and duration of stress differentially modulates the pain experience with acute stress typically thought to be analgesic, while chronic stress is thought to exacerbate pain. In particular, McCall will use mouse models to identify stress-induced adaptations in neural circuits that supply the dorsal spinal cord with norepinephrine.