Research

Medicinal chemistry focuses on all aspects of drug design, discovery and development with a unique blend of the physical and biological sciences. The scope of the field is sufficiently broad to give students with many different science backgrounds a rewarding and challenging program of study. Areas of research interests include drug discovery, organic synthesis of medicinal agents, natural products chemistry, prodrugs, topical drug delivery, peptide chemistry, molecular modeling, drug metabolism and molecular toxicology. In addition, UF’s preeminence and artificial intelligence initiatives have supported the hiring of several world-class researchers into the department and an expansion in areas that include natural products, cancer, anti-infectives, drug abuse and pain research.

The department of pharmaceutical outcomes and policy is a unique blend of social and administrative pharmacy, health outcomes research, pharmacoeconomics and pharmacoepidemiology. Researchers in the department focus on the evaluation of drugs and related medical technology. This focus includes classic pharmacoepidemiologic and pharmacoeconomic work in areas such as drug safety and comparative effectiveness, economic evaluation of pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical predictive analytics and pharmaceutical health services research, including assessments of pharmaceutical policy, quality and patient safety research. The department possesses a state-of-the-art data center fully qualified for quantitative research involving multiple research database with personal health information for more than 350 million lives.

Research in the department of pharmaceutics encompasses basic, applied, and clinical investigations in pharmacokinetics/biopharmaceutics, pharmaceutical analysis, pharmaceutical biotechnology and drug delivery. In addition to teaching, all faculty members are involved in collaborative research projects with clinical and other basic scientists at the University of Florida or UF Health. Many faculty maintain collaborative ties with scientists at other universities and the pharmaceutical industry worldwide. The department is also home to the UF Center for Pharmacometrics and Systems Pharmacology, a rigorous and integrative academic translational science program in quantitative clinical pharmacology with a focus on personalized medicine that is located at the UF Research and Academic Center in Lake Nona, Florida.

The department of pharmacodynamics is highly integrative and collaborative, spanning the gap between cellular and systems pharmacology and physiology. Faculty study drug action at the molecular, physiological and behavioral levels across normal and disease states, with interests in stress, anxiety, addiction, pain, neuroinflammation, cardiovascular and metabolic dysfunction. Department faculty use a wide variety of in vitro and in vivo techniques and approaches, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, electrophysiology, behavioral pharmacology, microdialysis testing, optogenetics and genome editing to develop novel models and understand drug action across a range of conditions.

Faculty in the department of pharmacotherapy and translational research are recognized as national leaders in many areas of research, including pharmacogenomics and precision medicine and pharmacy practice. The overarching research focus of the department is on understanding genetic and non-genetic factors that contribute to variability in drug response. These are applied to therapeutic areas including cardiovascular disease, oncology, clinical pharmacology, infectious disease and pulmonary disease. Departmental faculty are highly successful in obtaining research funding from numerous sources, including the National Institutes of Health. The department is home to the Center for Pharmacogenomics and Precision Medicine, where researchers have led major breakthroughs in determining how genes influence responses to drugs. At the forefront of moving pharmacogenomics discoveries into patient care, the center collaborates with UF Health’s Precision Medicine Program to establish genotyping as part of clinical care to guide drug prescribing.