UNC Institute for Pharmacogenomics
and Individualized Therapy

Bringing together researchers from the Schools of Medicine, Nursing, Business, Law, and Journalism, IPIT works to create effective therapy and precise treatment options for individual patients suffering from a wide range of conditions.

“It’s a level of complexity that no one person or even one school could take on,” IPIT director Howard McLeod says of the institute, which was launched in May 2007.

In addition to working with other schools and departments on campus, the institute will work with many Triangle-based companies, including LabCorp and GlaxoSmithKline. Officials with the Food and Drug Administration will hold adjunct appointments with the institute. McLeod also hopes to partner directly with community pharmacists.

Click here to read more about IPIT and its director, Howard McLeod, PhD.

Institute for Pharmacogenomics
and Individualized Therapy

Howard McLeod's faculty profile

Click here to read more about Betsy Sleath's research.

Betsy Sleath's faculty profile

Besty Sleath's Work with Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients and Glaucoma Sufferers

One of Sleath's projects is a collaboration with Betty Chewning, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was on Sleath's dissertation committee. The project, which studies how communication between rheumatologists and rheumatoid arthritis patients impacts medication use, is funded by the National Institute of Aging.

“That was a great example of team work because that was a $2 million grant,” Sleath says.

Sleath is also collaborating with international researchers on two glaucoma studies, one at the Aravind Eye Hospitals in India and the other one in Greece.

Harold Kohn and Alex Tropsha’s Collaboration on Drug Discovery

Two professors in the School’s Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products combined forces on a project to find new drug compounds to treat epilepsy. Tropsha’s lab, which specializes in computer-assisted drug design, used Kohn’s research data on anticonvulsants and produced computational models to identify likely drug candidates. Kohn’s lab then prepared the identified compounds and sent them to an National Institutes of Health testing lab for evaluation, which produced promising results.

“We had a significantly high percentage of compounds that had very nice activity, and it was activity that was predicted pretty well by the students [in Tropsha’s lab],” Kohn says. “We chose specifically to synthesize compounds that were as far removed as possible from my own working templates to test the computation method. I was very pleased with the results. We’ll need to further test those methods, but surely the initial results, which we published in a series of papers, were successful.”

Click here to read more about Alex Tropsha's research.

Click here to read more about Harold Kohn's research.

Alex Tropsha's faculty profile

Harold Kohn's faculty profile