Charles Peloquin, Pharm.D., the Jack C. Massey Endowed Professor and associate chair of the Department of Pharmacotherapy and Translational Research in the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, has been honored by the American College of Clinical Pharmacology, or ACCP, with the Roger Jelliffe Individualized Therapy Award.
This annual award recognizes an individual who has significantly advanced the field of personalized medicine by improving the use of drugs or biologics in patients. Peloquin received the award on Sept. 9, during the 2024 ACCP Annual Meeting in Bethesda, Maryland.
Receiving this recognition is especially meaningful to Peloquin, as its namesake, Roger Jelliffe, served as a mentor and a personal friend throughout Peloquin’s career.
“I appreciate that my colleagues took the time to look at our work and to note its contribution to patient care,” Peloquin said. “Roger was a mentor, a colleague, and a friend. It doesn’t get any better than this.”
Peloquin’s career in personalized medicine includes 36 years as the director of the Infectious Disease Pharmacokinetics Laboratory, an international reference clinical and research laboratory that specializes in antibiotic pharmacology and therapeutic drug monitoring. He began this position at Denver’s National Jewish Health, and for the past 15 years, he’s maintained it — and his commitment to personalized drug therapy for patients — while at UF.
“I think the more one cares for patients, the more one realizes that the existing knowledge does not cover every situation. You also realize that not all patients respond to ‘the standard dose,’” Peloquin said. “Then you consider the fact that people wear different size shirts, different size pants, and different size shoes. Why shouldn’t we expect them to require different size drug doses? So, I began to develop methods to allow for different size drug doses in patients with tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.”
The author of more than 400 manuscripts — including more than 250 original research articles, 50 review articles, and 50 book chapters — Peloquin has worked with the World Health Organization and the Curry International Tuberculosis Center to contribute to national and global treatment guidelines for diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS. No matter the disease area or issue he’s tackling, Peloquin enjoys employing team-based, problem-solving approaches that always keep patient outcomes top of mind.
“I get a lot of phone calls and emails that begin with, ‘I’ve got this patient.’ Some of the situations are highly unusual,” Peloquin said. “I try to work with the other clinicians to take the big problem and break it down into a series of smaller problems that are individually solvable. There is no substitute for the joy expressed by the clinicians when they say, ‘It worked!’”