UPDATE Interview: An interview with Gareth Veal
Gareth Veal Newcastle Cancer Centre Pharmacology Group, Northern Institute for Cancer Research, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4HH, UK
G.J.Veal@
ncl.ac.uk
Gareth Veal obtained his PhD in clinical pharmacology from the University of Liverpool (UK), where his studies focused on the quantification of antiretroviral drugs used for the treatment of HIV infection. He spent two years working as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School (MA, USA), before returning to the UK to take up a position at Newcastle University (UK), initiating and coordinating clinical pharmacology studies in the setting of childhood cancer. He is now Professor of Cancer Pharmacology and heads the Newcastle Cancer Centre Pharmacology Group at Newcastle University’s Northern Institute for Cancer Research.
Q
At what stage in your career did you first become involved in bioanalysis and what
attracted you to this area? For my PhD studies I worked in the laboratory of Dave Back at Liverpool University back in the 1990s, a time when research into the treatment of HIV disease was very much at its height. His group had recently become active in this area and my studies involved establishing assays for the quantification of zidovudine and other nucleoside analogues and their active triphosphate metabo- lites in peripheral blood lymphocytes collected from patients following treatment. It was exciting to be working in an area where there was so much to learn about drug metabolism, efficacy and drug interactions involving a wide range of novel anti- HIV drugs that were being developed at the time. This was my first introduction to HPLC assays and bioanalysis, working in a thriving research environment and I guess I never really looked back from this point forwards.
Q
Could you provide us with an update on your current research activities and interests?
My research group has two main areas of focus, both of which rely heavily on the development of bioanalytical assays for quantifying anti- cancer drugs. We work closely with Cancer Research UK (London, UK), pharma and academic groups in the UK and Europe in conducting pharmaco- kinetic studies as part of early phase clinical trials. Clearly this is an exciting area, learning about the
fate of drugs from first-in-man and often first-in- class studies, increasingly looking to correlate drug exposure and pharmacokinetics with pharmaco- dynamic biomarkers and endpoints. Our other major area of interest focuses on the coordination of clinical pharmacology studies in childhood cancer patients. Recent studies in particular have focused on learning about the pharmacokinetics of anticancer drugs in preterm infants and neo- nates, an incredibly challenging patient subpopu- lation to treat in terms of determining the opti- mal dosing regimens to utilize. In this space we recently obtained a grant from the Research for Patient Benefit funding stream of the National Institute for Health Research (London, UK) for carrying out therapeutic drug monitoring in hard to treat childhood cancer patient groups. This 3 year programme of work will allow us to roll out a national programme utilizing real-time drug lev- els to maximize the chances that patient groups (including neonates, anephric and obese patients) achieve drug concentrations that are most likely to result in efficacy with acceptable toxicity profiles.
Q
What would you say was the most exciting bioanalytical project that you worked on in
2017? We were recently involved in a research project that involved quantification of the drug pegcan- tratinib, a tropomyosin receptor kinase inhibitor being investigated for the treatment of patients with germline mutations in the tumor suppres- sor gene CYLD. These patients develop multiple, disfiguring hair follicle tumors on the head and neck and we developed a novel drug penetration
www.bioanalysis-zone.com
26
26
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58
