Training in Pharmacological Sciences
Program Director: John F. Hancock, University of Texas Medical School
This interdisciplinary Training Program in Pharmacological Sciences (TPS) is designed to train leaders for academia, biotechnology/industrial firms, and regulatory agencies who will develop innovations, approaches, and new strategies for drug development and accelerate the rate of bringing new therapeutics to the market. This training program is unique in several ways: (1) it spans the entire range of drug development from initial target identification and validation through Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, (2) it is led by Dr. John F. Hancock, Professor and Chair, Integrative Biology and Pharmacology, UTHealth, and a leadership team with extensive, first-hand experience in the pharmaceutical industry as well as academia, (3) it introduces a systems biology approach to achieve efficacy and safety by identifying and selectively modulating relevant pathways, rather than individual targets and addresses all major phases of the drug development process, and (4) it includes analyses of major successes and failures in the pharmaceutical industry and regulatory agencies.
This is an educational cooperative of six neighboring institutions - Baylor College of Medicine, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Rice University, University of Houston, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. The training faculty includes more than 50 members with broad research expertise and extensive training experience.
Our trainees will benefit not only from traditional experiences, knowledge, and established approaches, but also from exposure to important recent advances and systems biology approaches to target validation, drug specificity, safety, human heterogeneity, human trial design, data capture, and interpretation. This challenging goal is met by exposure of our trainees to an integrated combination of the inventiveness and training historically found in academia, the development expertise of biotech and pharma, and regulatory challenges and initiatives of agencies such as the FDA. Such synergy in training accelerates academic relevance, industrial productiveness, individual career advancement, and ultimately, public health benefits.
- For all students, the TPS program overlays training in Systems Biology and Drug Development. The goal here is quite different than that of the dissertation-based learning. It is to provide a broad overview of these two areas that we believe is absolutely essential for those who will participate in all aspects of bringing safe, efficacious therapeutics to the public in a timely and cost effective manner, whether they work in academia, industry, or government. This broad overview is not intended to make every trainee an expert in Systems Biology or all aspects of Drug Development (although some will develop expertise in aspects of one or the other). Rather it is to ensure that all will have a basic understanding of key concepts in both that will enable them to work more efficiently and effectively with teams of scientists (that will include such experts) than students who have not been exposed to these areas throughout most of an integrated curriculum.
- The training program also offers (1) the unique combination of breath and expertise of our faculty in relevant areas plus their aggregate experience with academic institutions, private industry, and regulatory agencies, (2) curriculum involving integrated blocks of seminars (including student presentations) and case studies of drug development successes and failures.