Two College of Pharmacy researchers funded by Children’s Miracle Network

Research to aid children with asthma and type 1 juvenile diabetes will be expanded with new support from the Children’s Miracle Network to two College of Pharmacy faculty at the University of Florida Health Science Center.

Michael Asmus, Pharm.D., an assistant professor of pharmacy practice, received a one-year award of $15,618 to further his clinical research on the difference between the inhaled delivery of fluticasone, a steroid that reduces inflammation in the airways, through two holding chambers with similar appearance yet different bench-top performance characteristics. The two holding chambers under study, E-Z Spacer® and InspirEase®, both have a plastic, bellows-like bag designed to briefly hold a puff of medicine from the attached metered-dose inhaler to make inhaling medication easier for children.

Asmus’ lab previously proved that a lot less drug is potentially delivered to the lungs by the E-Z Spacer compared with InspirEase.

“Now we want to see if that makes a difference in what gets to the patient. Fluticasone is absorbed only in the lungs, so what is absorbed in the blood indirectly measures how much got into the lungs,” Asmus said. “Interchanging one spacer with another can potentially result in wide fluctuations in the dose delivered to the patient.”

Despite the lack of a clinical comparison of their relative performance, Florida Medicaid requires substitution of InspirEase, which costs $18, with the less-expensive E-Z Spacer ($12) for all Medicaid-related prescriptions. Asmus will conduct a randomized, double-blind, crossover study of the two.

“This study lays important groundwork for future clinical investigations of how the physical characteristics of a single glucocorticoid aerosol can affect both the clinical outcomes and side effects of this steroid,” Asmus said.

Sihong Song, Ph.D., an assistant professor of pharmaceutics, received a one-year, $20,000 Children’s Miracle Network award for his research aimed at developing a new gene therapy for the prevention of type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease characterized by destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas.

Researchers have found that type 1 diabetes does not occur when insulin-producing cells in the pancreas are protected. Song will use the new funds for equipment to support his research to develop an effective gene-drug delivery system to protect those cells.