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ChE
graduate Kryscio receives NSF Fellowship
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David Kryscio |
David Kryscio, who earned
a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering at UK in May 2006
and a Master of Business Administration degree from the Gatton College
of Business and Economics in 2007, has been awarded a National Science
Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
The Graduate Research Fellowship
provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based
master's or doctoral degrees and is intended for students who are at
the early stages of their graduate study. Kryscio will begin work on
a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin this fall.
"I am very honored to
receive this fellowship and look forward to continuing my education
at UT-Austin," said Kryscio, a 2002 graduate of Bryan Station High
School in Lexington. "My research experience gained here at UK
will prove to be invaluable throughout my graduate studies and career."
As an undergraduate, Kryscio
was involved in two research projects. With Dr. Zach Hilt of the chemical
engineering faculty and Dr. Michael Jay of pharmaceutical sciences as
his co-advisors, Kryscio was part of an effort to develop in vitro methods
for the assessment of therapeutic equivalence between name brand and
generic pharmaceutical topical creams which contain the same components
in the same amount.
"Currently, the only
means by which a generic can be claimed bioequivalent to a previously
FDA-approved innovator is through clinical trials," Kryscio said.
"These trials are time intensive, costly, and specific to a certain
topical. Therefore, we investigated the viability of an alternative
method, namely rheological analyses which assess the flow properties
of the formulations and can give insight into differences in their microstructure.
"We developed a several
methods to assess the microstructure of these creams using rheology,"
he continued. "While these techniques may not necessarily prove
bioequivalence, they can be utilized as an inexpensive and expeditious
screening tool prior to clinical trials, which would benefit both the
generic manufacturers as well as the FDA."
A manuscript highlighting
their work has been submitted for journal publication, Kryscio said.
A second project, with Hilt
as his advisor, involves drug delivery and focuses on the design of
novel moiety imprinted polymer (MoIPs) structures to produce hydrogels
with increased affinity for target pharmaceutical compounds, resulting
in enhanced loading.
"In previous work, entire
drug molecules have been imprinted for, which has limited applicability
due to the high cost of many pharmaceutical compounds. In contrast,
this current work imprints for general moieties (carbohydrates, oligosaccharides,
etc.) of pharmaceutical drugs in order to produce recognition sites
within polymeric networks," Kryscio said.
" In theory, this will
lead to a very broad range of therapeutic drugs that could be loaded
and released from a given gel."
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