UB pharmacy’s Jason Sprowl receives AACP New Investigator Award

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Jason Sprowl, PhD, assistant professor in the University at Buffalo School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, has received a 2019 New Investigator Award from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP).

The AACP New Investigator Award provides startup funding for independent research projects of early-career pharmacy faculty. Sprowl will use the award to examine the relationship between sodium-glucose transport proteins and tyrosine kinase inhibitors — a class of drugs that shut down tyrosine kinases, which are crucial enzymes that serve as on or off switches in many cellular functions.

The grant will also support Sprowl’s travel to the 2020 AACP Annual Meeting in Long Beach, California to present his findings.

Both sodium-glucose transport protein function and use of tyrosine kinase inhibitors are associated with gastrointestinal toxicity, leading investigators to believe that the protein’s function is dependent on, and possibly reduced by, the drug.

The results of the study will improve knowledge of sodium-glucose transport protein function. If investigators discover that tyrosine kinase inhibitors impact the protein’s function, the findings could encourage the design of treatment strategies that lower gastrointestinal toxicity or the development of inhibitor drugs that don’t target the protein.

These findings could also be applied to cancer treatment, as recent studies observed that tumors increase the production of sodium-glucose transport proteins to promote growth.

The AACP is a national organization that strives to advance pharmacy education, research, scholarship, practice and service to improve societal health.