The Pharmacist / Spring 2022 / Volume 44 / Issue 2

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Dr. Steve Lee DEVELOPING TOOLS TO IMPROVE CANCER DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT As a chemical engineering undergraduate student, Dr. Steve Lee readily admits cancer research didn’t register on his radar. When a beloved uncle passed away in 2014 of lung cancer, however, the prospects of improving cancer diagnosis and treatment options took on added meaning. Lee, an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, has spent recent years leveraging his engineering background to develop new tools and methods for drug delivery research, including the creation of a microscopic tool that enables 3D tissue image sampling at cellular resolution. The innovation allows investigators to view both the cancer cell and the cancer drug in the same tissue in 3D, which can provide clinicians richer insights into how a specific drug is attacking a cancerous cell. “With this knowledge, we can then modify drugs chemically or genetically so more of the drug goes to the cancerous cells,” says Lee, who is also trying to integrate his lab’s microscopic technique with other tissue assay technologies. While Lee says his mother’s recent brain cancer diagnosis has brought an added layer of urgency and motivation to his work, he also finds inspiration in UIC colleagues like Dr. Debra Tonetti who have seen their cancer drug candidates enter clinical trials and march toward marketplace acceptance. “This is personal for me,” Lee says. “I want to move research from the bench to the clinic and impact lives.” A RESEARCH SHIFT FUELED FROM THE PAIN OF LOSS For much of his professional scientific career, Dr. Tom Gao worked on large-scale research of proteins and peptides, including predictive work regarding the potential side effects and toxicities of certain drug interactions. Four years ago, though, Gao’s research interests shifted after his grandmother passed from metastatic melanoma—28 years after she faced her initial diagnosis and treatment of the same disease. “We all thought it was gone, but cancer’s a sneaky disease,” Gao says. “She was already in stage IV metastatic cancer when diagnosed this time, and it was too late.” Noting the need for an accessible, easy-toperform test for early diagnosis, Gao has shifted part of his research focus to cancer diagnostics. Specifically, Gao and colleagues have developed a novel liquid biopsy method, a less invasive, better tolerated procedure designed to improve detection and treatment. In a current collaboration with UI Health and Pfizer, Gao’s team is using machine learning to predict, via exosomes separated from blood and with greater than 90% accuracy, the breast cancer patients best positioned to respond to specific treatments. Gao, an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, anticipates publishing the findings of this work in the first half of 2022. “Think of the time we gain if we can perform better diagnosis and treatment on everyone,” Gao says. “If successful, we will bring something great to this world.” HAVING AN IMMEDIATE IMPACT ON PATIENTS After earning his PharmD degree in 2012, Dr. Eric Wenzler envisioned a fruitful clinical career. After two years of residency and three years of fellowship, though, Wenzler realized the best researchers are good clinicians and vice versa. “We identify unmet needs on the clinical side and immediately utilize our research skills and knowledge to solve those problems,” Wenzler says. Improved alignment between the bench and the bedside has been Wenzler’s dominant focus since joining UIC’s faculty ranks in 2017 as an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacy Practice. Specifically, Wenzler and his sevenmember lab team investigate optimal use of existing antibiotic combinations against super resistant gram-negative pathogens for which there are no currently viable treatment options. Dr. Zack One notable example: Seeing no clear Bulman antibiotic recommendations for patients on continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) facing bacterial infections, Wenzler and his team began examining the use of a niche antibiotic called cefiderocol. Following in vitro studies in Wenzler’s lab as well as patient modeling, the Wenzler- Dr. Eric Wenzler Dr. Tom Gao 14 THE PHARMACIST PHARMACY.UIC.EDU
led group earned the first-ever FDA-approved package insert for an antibiotic with CRRT dosing. “This work is about putting patients at the center of care,” Wenzler says. “It’s that ability to have a tangible impact on patient lives that drives our work.” ON A MISSION TO PRESERVE ANTIBIOTICS As a high school senior, Dr. Zack Bulman rushed toward a microbiology research opportunity at the Rochester Institute of Technology. While that experience spurred a deeper attraction to scientific research, Bulman felt a disconnect between this research and its potential impact on patient care. Intent on bridging that gap, Bulman gained a deeper clinical perspective while earning a PharmD degree. A subsequent two-year fellowship in infectious disease pharmacology, meanwhile, heightened his research pursuits. Since arriving at UIC in 2017, Bulman’s investigative work has included optimizing antibiotic dosing for drugresistant bacteria and repurposing older antibiotics to combat newer resistant mechanisms. “Bacteria are fascinating to me, especially how they can evolve and become resistant to antibiotics so quickly,” says Bulman, an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacy Practice. While long interested in preserving antibiotics for future generations, that work has gained added importance for Bulman since he became a father in January 2021. He wants to avoid a postantibiotic future in which bacteria resist the available antidotes. “Those cases are few and far between now, but we don’t want that to become commonplace,” he says. “Becoming a father has helped me more fully consider the impact of what we’re doing in our lab and what it means to the future.” UNRELENTING INQUIRY TO PROPEL DISCOVERY Whenever Dr. Nora Vazquez-Laslop fell ill as a child growing up in Mexico City, her father, a local surgeon, prescribed the commonly accepted antidote. A naturally inquisitive soul, Vazquez-Laslop often responded with a litany of questions about how the medication worked in her body to restore health. And her father, wise as he was, struggled to share answers. “He knew a certain medication would help, but he didn’t fully understand how it worked at the molecular level,” Vazquez-Laslop says. That innate curiosity led Vazquez-Laslop to study biology. “The basis of medicine,” she calls it. And it has spurred a spirited career researching protein synthesis. Alongside UIC colleague Dr. Alexander Mankin, Vazquez-Laslop, a research professor at UIC’s Center for Biomolecular Sciences, studies the relationship between antibiotics and ribosomes, including the “tricks bacteria use to dodge antibiotics.” The tandem has discovered, for instance, that some antibiotics are not universal inhibitors, but rather modulators of protein synthesis. That novel finding opens the door to designing “super selective” antibiotics that only kill pathogenic bacteria. Such research, she says, unveils gaps in seemingly well-understood concepts and creates opportunities for new methodologies that enrich knowledge and fuel compelling drug discovery. “We see others using our research to pursue drug development or to reinterpret their existing data,” Vazquez-Laslop says. “We’re building knowledge that is driving therapeutic science forward.” CHASING THE THRILL OF DISCOVERY As a university student in Moscow in 1975, Dr. Alexander “Shura” Mankin and one of his scientific peers flipped a coin to determine their immediate research track. While the fates sent Mankin’s colleague to work on viruses, Makin himself landed with a research group investigating ribosomes. While ribosomes were then a rather underexplored field, interest in the scientific area exploded across the final decades of the twentieth century and into the new millennium. Mankin, meanwhile, retained that research focus and became increasingly mesmerized himself. “The more we learned, the more interesting and mysterious it all became,” Mankin says. Mankin carried his ambitious inquiry to UIC in 1993, eager to bring knowledgedriven drug discovery to a process long governed by serendipity. Through more than 100 published works, Mankin’s pioneering work on protein synthesis has propelled deeper understanding of how antibiotics interact with targets in the cell and Dr. Alexander Mankin We’re not discovering any drugs tomorrow, but we’re laying a foundation others can build upon. SPRING 2022 THE PHARMACIST 15
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The Pharmacist / Spring 2022 / Volume 44 / Issue 2

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