Shortage" at the annual Pharmacy and Technology Conference of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores on August 28th in San Diego. Dr. Knapp is a recognized expert on pharmacist workforce issues and the project director of the Aggregate Demand Index, a monthly national report on the demand for pharmacists in the United States (www.pharmacymanpower.com). Dr. Knapp is often quoted in the press on the topic of pharmacy workforce issues. See “Touro in the News”

• College Welcomes Cancer Researcher to Faculty: The College welcomed Dr. Alison McCormick as part of an effort to expand into new areas of research application. Dr. McCormick will continue vaccine development efforts in collaboration with a local biotechnology company, with a central focus on cancer therapeutics, including therapy of infectious disease induced cancers. Four of her recent publications highlight her efforts, and the unique application of the plant virus Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) to produce vaccines with therapeutic efficacy. The first publication illustrates the ability of TMV-peptide fusions to stimulate neutralizing antibody titers and protective immunity in a rabbit challenge model of papillomavirus-induced cancer (Palmer et al., Vaccine. 2006;24:5516-25). Two additional papers accepted for publication describe the use of TMV-peptide fusions to protect mice from tumor outgrowth in two different tumor models (McCormick et al., Vaccine. 2006 Jul 5; [Epub ahead of print] and McCormick et al., Bioconjugate Chemistry 2006, in press). Ongoing efforts will focus on describing the mechanism of TMV-induced immune activation, including Dendritic cell uptake and Toll-like-receptor mediated signaling, and the development of a vaccine for application in a phase I clinical trial for cancer therapy. Lastly, TMV has also been used to deliver functional RNA to immune cells, and this innovative approach is described in a manuscript that was recently accepted for publication in Virology (Smith et al, Virology 06, in press).

• Neuropsychiatry Expert Delivering National and International Presentations: Dr. Selena Bartlett will give an invited talk October 27, 2006 at the Gala Awards Dinner & Scientific Symposium of the National Alliance for Schizophrenia and Allied Disorders Society in New York City as the Sidney Baer Trust Investigator for her work on dopamine receptor trafficking. In June, she chaired a symposium at the Research Society for Alcoholism meeting in Baltimore on “The Dark Side: Targeting Stressful Neuroadaptations in the Treatment of Alcoholism.” Dr. Bartlett will also chair a symposium and give a talk on a similar topic at the upcoming International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism in Sydney, Australia. She also gave presentations recently at the following: the Amgen and University of California, San Francisco joint meeting held at UCSF; The Southern Research Institute in Birmingham Alabama; and at The School of Pharmacy at The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Dr. Bartlett has been invited onto the program committee for medications development for the Research Society for Alcoholism, which will meet in 2007.

-Compiled with Assistance from Nathalie Bergeron, Associate Professor College of Pharmacy.