Graduate Student Research Award for Manchester pharmacist

Manchester Pharmacy School postgraduate student Andres Olivares-Morales has been awarded the Graduate Student Research Award in Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics, Drug Metabolism and Clinical Pharmacology and Translational Research at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Annual Meeting and Exposition 2015, which took place recently in Orlando.

The award recognises excellence in graduate education in the above fields and is intended for graduate students in their final year of their programme and is given based on at the quality of the PhD work. Andres submitted a summary of his thesis work entitled ‘Prediction of oral drug bioavailability in humans: from animal-based extrapolation towards the application of physiologically-based pharmacokinetic modelling and simulation’ and an abstract.

His research is focused on the prediction of drug’s behaviour after oral administration using modelling and simulations approaches. This approach is useful as it can help to explore ‘what if?’ type of questions without performing clinical trials, thus helping to reduce the amount of unnecessary trials (in both animals and humans) in the different drug development stages. In particular, his research is trying to anticipate the factors that limit the amount of drug that reaches the body after oral administration.

Andres said: “I’m very happy and honoured about this award, not only because is a recognition to the work I’ve been doing in my PhD from the AAPS, one the biggest association of pharmaceutical scientists in the world, but also because it’s a very prestigious award that will help as a good start in my career, especially now that I’m finishing my PhD.

“I’m also very pleased about making the right decision to coming to Manchester and Manchester Pharmacy School for my PhD because of the opportunities that I’ve been given during this period, like being able to present my research in various scientific meetings in Europe and the US.

“None of this would have been possible without the advice of my supervisors Professors Leon Aarons and Amin Rostami and the excellent discussions of my friends and colleagues of the Centre for Applied Pharmacokinetics of the Manchester Pharmacy School and, of course, without the funding and opportunities provided by my PhD scholarship from CONICYT Chile and my President’s Doctoral Scholar Award from The University of Manchester.”