Study to examine pharmacists’ influence on transplant patients

Marie Chisholm-Burns, professor and head of the Department of Pharmacy Practice and Science, has been awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health of more than $1 million to study the effects of pharmacists’ involvement in renal transplant patients’ drug therapy.

The NIH R01 Grant will allow Chisholm-Burns and her team to see if pharmacists working more directly with transplant patients will help the patients stay on medication regimens designed to decrease their rejection of transplanted kidneys.

“We will be looking at patients’ adherence to medications and their therapeutic response to medications,” says Chisholm-Burns, who is principal investigator on the project. “We’ll study quality of life and economic outcomes, also.”

It is the first time in UA College of Pharmacy history that a person holding a PharmD degree has been awarded NIH funding as principal investigator.

Chisholm-Burns will be joined on the project by co-investigator Stephen Joel Coons, director of the Patient-Reported Outcomes Consortium at the Critical Path Institute; John Musil, founder, president and CEO of the Apothecary Shop; Eric Sredzinski, clinical affairs director for an Apothecary Shop in Phoenix; and College of Pharmacy employees Christina Spivey, research and administration coordinator, and Clara Ehrman, research coordinator.

The team will conduct a longitudinal, controlled study of more than 100 patients in Georgia and Arizona over the course of two years.

Chisholm-Burns is the founder and executive director of the Medication Access Program in Georgia, a program that provides services to increase access to medications for solid-organ transplant recipients. She is an expert in transplant medicine.

Photo (from left): Marie Chisholm-Burns, Christina Spivey, Eric Sredzinsky and Clara Ehrman.

Posted Nov. 4, 2009