New publications from School of Pharmacy faculty

Please join me in congratulating School of Pharmacy faculty members Fawzy Elbarbry, PhD, RPh, BCPS and Deepa Rao, PhD, on their recent publications of new work.

Fawzy has published an article on “A new validated HPLC method for the determination of levodopa: Application to study the impact of ketogenic diet on the pharmacokinetics of levodopa in Parkinson's participants”. The co-authors include a Pacific University student, Van Nguyen, and several collaborators from Legacy Research Institute. Here is a link: Elbarbry et al. 

A simple, accurate, and reproducible HPLC‐UV method has been developed and validated for the quantification of levodopa (L‐Dopa) in human plasma. The method involves a simple protein precipitation procedure to extract both L‐Dopa and methyldopa, the internal standard...This method was also successfully applied for studying the potential effect of ketogenic diet on the pharmacokinetics of L‐Dopa in Parkinson's participants. Our data analysis indicates that ketogenic diet does not significantly affect the pharmacokinetics of L‐Dopa.

Dr. Rao is co-author on project published with collaborators from OSU, including Pacific University alumna Brianna Cote (PharmD, '16). The paper “Liposomal formulation of hypoxia activated prodrug for the treatment of ovarian cancer” appears in Journal of Controlled Release. From the abstract:

In this work, a new sphingomyelin-cholesterol liposomal formulation (CPD100Li) for the delivery of a hypoxia activated prodrug of vinblastine, mon-N-oxide (CPD100), is developed. The optimized liposomal formulation uses an ionophore (A23187) mediated pH-gradient method. Optimized CPD100Li is characterized for size, drug loading, and stability. The in vitro toxicity of CPD100Li is assessed on different aspects of cell proliferation and apoptosisof ES2 ovarian cancer under normoxic and hypoxic conditions. The pharmacokinetics of CPD100Li in mice as well as the influence of A23187 on the retention of CPD100 are assessed. The dose limiting toxicity (DLT) and maximum tolerated dose (MTD) for CPD100Li are evaluated in nude mice...Based on the preliminary data obtained, we clearly show that the presence of ionophore affects the in vivo stability of CPD100. CPD100Li presents a unique opportunity to develop a first-in-kind chemotherapy product based on achieving selective drug activation through the hypoxic physiologic microenvironment of solid tumors.