Research Teams
The USC School of Pharmacy works collaboratively across the university and around the world to seek the next big breakthroughs in health care. The School focuses on cutting-edge research in the design, discovery, targeting and delivery of novel therapies that improve human health—particularly in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, cardiovascular ailments, diabetes and immune system disorders. The wide range of expertise among our faculty, including biotechnology, chemical biology, and health economics and policy, allows for a rich collaborative environment that facilitates innovation.
The only private school of pharmacy on a major health sciences campus, the School benefits from a strong interdisciplinary environment that fosters new insights into challenging scientific, regulatory and health economics issues. Consistently the top-ranked school of pharmacy in the nation, the School also is second in National Institutes of Health funding for pharmacy schools.
Our team approach provides a flexible research model that allows us to seamlessly align strengths as needed, while building upon laboratory successes—speeding the translation from breakthrough scientific discovery to direct improvement in patient care as well as innovative new practice models. In this section, you’ll learn more about our three primary teams, the faculty in each and the research currently underway at the School.
Research highlights
Associate Professor Jason Doctor, PhD, received an $11.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project to dissuade physicians from unnecessarily prescribing antibiotics for common acute respiratory infections.
A lifetime appointee to the Institute of Medicine, Dr. Goldman leads one of the nation’s premier centers for innovative, independent health policy research. Recent work looks at raising U.S. life expectancy while saving the government $632 billion by 2050.
How do you increase patient access to medication while reducing costs?
Patients who need prescriptions, such as statins for moderate risk of coronary heart disease, have improved access and increased utilization rates when those drugs are moved to behind-the-counter status with a pharmacist to provide counseling and medication management.
The School of Pharmacy houses numerous research faculty whose work centers on new insights and approaches to metabolic disorders such as diabetes, as well as exploring the relationship between premature aging and diabetes.
The biotechnology team focuses on drug design, development and delivery, working toward breakthroughs that will transform tomorrow’s medicine by generating new drug compounds for diagnostic and therapeutic use.
USC has the 5th fastest super computer cluster in the U.S., and Nouri Neamati is using it to advance his cancer and HIV/AIDS research.
