The University of South Carolina College of Pharmacy is pleased to announce it is the recipient of a new five-year National Institutes of Health R01 award totaling $2.1 million.
The research project is entitled “Knowledge discovery and machine learning to elucidate the mechanisms of HIV activity and interaction with substance use disorder.” Michael Shtutman, Ph.D., associate professor and director of the Functional Genomics Core in the Drug Discovery and Biomedical Sciences Department, will serve as principal investigator.
The project was developed from a long-running collaboration between Shtutman, Scott Sutton, Pharm.D., chair of the Clinical Pharmacy and Outcomes Sciences Department for the College of Pharmacy, and computer scientist Ilya Safro, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware.
This exciting award represents the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and big data science ...
Michael Wyatt, Ph.D. Chair, Department of Drug Discovery and Biomedical Sciences
The central goal of the proposal to is develop and apply an integrative artificial intelligence-based approach to analyze biomedical datasets and electronic health records to determine new mechanisms of HIV and drugs of abuse interactions, and to discover repurposed drug candidates for the treatment of HIV-infected substance abuse disorder patients.
“This exciting award represents the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and big data science,” says Michael Wyatt, Ph.D., chair of DDBS in the College of Pharmacy. “This award is also special because, to my knowledge, it is the first ever collaborative NIH grant between the two departments in our College of Pharmacy.”
“Our faculty work so incredibly well together for the overall benefit of our college,” adds Interim Dean Julie Sease, Pharm.D., “and this is just one example of the excellent outcomes which result from the wonderful team of scientists and clinicians we have working here.”