College of Pharmacy professor Julie Johnson awarded two NIH grants

Julie Johnson, Pharm.D., a professor in pharmacy practice, has been awarded two NIH grants for studies of heart medications.

A $598,799, five-year mid-career investigator award from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute will enable Johnson to increase her focus on patient-oriented research and to train and nurture the next generation of researchers. She currently has three postdoctoral fellows in her lab and has previously trained seven other postdoctoral fellows in clinical/ translational research.

Johnson, the director of the UF Center for Pharmacogenomics, also received a $144,983, one-year grant to support her continuing research in beta-blocker pharmacogenetics. Beta-blockers, a class of drugs widely used for the treatment of high blood pressure and other heart diseases, block the action of certain hormones, slowing the heart rate and decreasing the force with which the heart muscle contracts.

Johnson will collect genetic samples from black, white and Hispanic patients who have hypertension, and in collaboration with Drs. Carl Pepine and Rhonda Cooper-DeHoff in UF’s division of cardiovascular medicine, determine if the apparent ethnic differences in beta-blocker response are a reflection of variations in individual genetic makeup.

The grant is a supplement to a University of California San Diego NIH-supported Pharmacogenetics Network Grant, one of 10 to 12 NIH network centers, that will perform some of Johnson’s data analysis.

In the last two years, Johnson has been awarded over $1.6 million from NIH.