From the Barry and Judy Silverman College of Pharmacy…
Peter Gannett, Ph.D.
Peter Gannett, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Research, College of Pharmacy, has been awarded a training grant from the NIH. The grant, titled Undergraduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement at Nova Southeastern University (URISE@NSU). The award, totaling $1.5 million, will support undergraduate students to be trained in conducting research. Students will receive research, career development, and didactic training over a two-year period. The grant provides students with tuition and a stipend so that they can focus on research year-round. In addition to the College of Pharmacy, the Colleges of Psychology, Osteopathic Medicine, Allopathic Medicine, Dental Medicine, Computing and Engineering, and the Halmos College of Arts and Science, are collaborating on the grant.
Research from Mohammad Golam Sabbir, Ph.D., NSU Alumna Mamiko Swanson, B.S. (c/o 2022), and Benedict C. Albensi, Ph.D., BCMAS, CRQM, titled “Deletion of Cholinergic Receptor Muscarinic 1 (Chrm1) disrupts mouse cortical mitochondrial structure and function by affecting the supramolecular assembly of oxidative phosphorylation-associated proteins: Implications in Alzheimer’s disease” was presented at Sunposium 2023, hosted by the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience (MPFI) from March 6-8, 2023.
(Left to right) Ken Dawson-Scully, Ph.D., M.Sc., Bob Speth, Ph.D., M.A., Paulina Morelund (third-year PharmD student), Mamiko Swanson (December 2022 NSU graduate), and Mohammad Sabbir, Ph.D.
The results presented at Sunposium 2023 are a continuation of the group’s most recent publication in the Journal of Alzheimer’s disease (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36155524/), where postmortem human brain tissues obtained from different brain repositories in the USA were used to demonstrate that a subset of Alzheimer’s patients exhibited severe loss of CHRM1 protein in the brain, which was associated with early death compared to age-matched non-demented healthy individuals. In the current study, the group introduced a novel molecular mechanism interpreting how the loss of CHRM1 in the CHRM1 gene-deleted mouse brain dampens mitochondrial function in the neurons, which provides a mechanistic explanation of the poor survival of patients having loss of CHRM1 protein in their brain. The findings provided a novel mechanistic insight into CHRM1 protein-mediated mitochondrial regulation which will be the subject of future studies.
The results that were presented at Sunposium 2023 have been submitted for publication in the Frontiers in Cell and Development journal under the signalling subsection and is currently under peer review.
Jean Latimer, Ph.D.
Jean Latimer, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the College of Pharmacy and the Director of the AutoNation Institute for Breast Cancer Research and Care. She was recently interviewed on TV and the Sun Sentinel newspaper for her work in breast cancer especially concerning women of African-American descent. Congratulations to Dr Jean Latimer on her TV interview and recent Sun Sentinel newspaper article on Breast Cancer in Broward County.
Benedict Albensi, Ph.D.
Benedict Albensi, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy has been ranked as #2 in Florida for his number of publications over the past 10 years on Nuclear Factor Kappa B (NF-kB). His expertise in this area has been rated at the top 0.046% of 206,590 authors on this topic. Similarly, he is ranked in the top 0.34% for Alzheimer Disease. A recent paper of Dr. Albensi received 140,499 total views and has been cited 123 times.