Oliver Hubbard Awarded Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation Scholarship
Molecular Pharmaceutics Ph.D. student Oliver Hubbard (Ghandehari Lab) was awarded a Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation Scholarship. His research focuses on optimizing drug dosing guidelines for patients undergoing Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) therapy. ECMO is a highly intensive cardiovascular life support system for critical patients suffering from heart and lung failure. ECMO patients are dosed a variety of drugs for many reasons, but due to interactions between the administered drugs and the ECMO circuit, dosing guidelines for many drugs are unclear in the ECMO environment. Currently, there is a high-cost barrier in performing ex vivo studies to visualize and quantify how individual drugs are sequestered within the ECMO circuit, which limits the amount of data available to clinicians related to drug interactions with the ECMO circuit.
Oliver is developing a low-cost mimic of the key ECMO circuit component, the oxygenator, which can allow for high throughput screening of drugs in the ECMO environment at a low cost. His project will then branch into computational modeling, where ex vivo data generated from the low-cost ECMO mimic circuit dosed with various drugs can be inputted into physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models to predict drug concentrations over time in a virtual pediatric ECMO patient. After optimization of the PBPK models, he hopes to translate the predicted drug data into optimized dosing regimens of individual drugs for pediatric patients on ECMO.
Oliver shared, “I am extremely grateful to be receiving the Curci Fellowship for this year, and was certainly very excited once I heard the news that I received the award. With this support, I am looking forward to diving into my work on the computational side of things, developing new PBPK models for drugs exposed to the ECMO environment. With these models, we hope to generate optimized dosing regimens for individual drugs to improve the quality of care, and quality of life for these critically ill ECMO patients. I'm excited for this work and very grateful for the support from the Curci Foundation!”
