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Institute to Give UCSD $30M for Pharmacy School

UC San Diego said it landed a $30 million gift from the Skaggs Institute for Research to support its new School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, one of only two public pharmacy schools in California.

This marks the largest gift to UCSD Health Sciences, the school said in a written statement Nov. 4.

The facility will be named the UCSD Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in honor of Sam Skaggs, a philanthropist and pioneer in the retail drug store and grocery business.

The money will be payable over five years.

Ten million dollars will be made available immediately to recruit faculty, buy specialized equipment, and build an auditorium and learning center in the facility, which is still under construction on the La Jolla campus.

The building is planned for completion in time for students to take classes in the fall of 2006.

A $20 million endowment will help fund future needs, to be determined by the school’s founding dean and the associate vice chancellor for health sciences, Palmer Taylor.

In the early years of the endowment, funding will primarily go toward resources for faculty and students, UCSD said.

Dr. Edward Holmes, the vice chancellor for health sciences and dean of the UCSD School of Medicine, and Marye Anne Fox, UCSD’s chancellor, said the generous gift opens the door to new possibilities.

Fox noted that the gift leverages the investment made by the state and helps ensure that the educational goals will be met.

Holmes pointed to potential partnerships with nearby institutions, such as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where chemists work on compounds from the sea, to relationships with the biology and chemistry departments on the general campus.

The new generation of pharmacists will receive broad training, said Taylor.

Students learn about pharmacogenomics, or how to tailor drugs for patients based on their genetic profile, bio-informatics, using computers to manage and analyze data, and computational drug design.

Dr. David Shapiro, who is the chief medical officer at the San Diego-based privately held biotechnology firm Idun Pharmaceuticals Inc. and did his postgraduate studies in pharmaceutical medicine, applauded the broad-based educational approach.

“The broader the education, the broader the job opportunities,” Shapiro said.

Most people put pharmacists behind the counter of a retail drugstore, but their know-how in drug formulation, dosing and drug manufacturing also makes them a hot commodity in the biotech industry.

“Chemists and biologists focus on the research and discovery of drugs, whereas the pharmacists have an impact on the development and the translational aspect (from compounds, or experimental drugs to real drugs).

At Idun, Shapiro leads the effort to try to translate compounds for treating liver diseases into marketable drugs.

“I am involved in every aspect of new drugs,” Shapiro said. It’s a huge job with no guarantees that a drug will be approved, according to industry insiders.

UCSD wants to prepare the first class of 25 students entered in September 2002 to become the next leaders in the profession of pharmacy. Eventually, the school hopes to serve 240 pharmacy doctorate students, or Pharm.D.s, and 60 Ph.D. students.

“The school’s innovative curriculum was designed to prepare students to be the leaders in the profession of pharmacy, and provide them with the tools to practice effectively in a wide variety of roles in hospitals and medical centers, community pharmacy settings, academia, government and the pharmaceutical industry,” UCSD said.

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