Skip to main content
College of Pharmacy

Research

PREMIER Center Launches Community Pharmacy Research Network

The UHCOP-based Prescription Drug Misuse Education and Research Center (PREMIER) is developing a Texas-based community pharmacy research hub to better understand barriers faced by patients at the point-of-dispensing and formulate solutions to reduce those barriers.

New Discovery Uses Salt to Overcome Major Obstacle in Gene Therapy

Researchers at the University of Houston College of Pharmacy have discovered an unexpected simple strategy to improve the performance of mRNA vaccines and gene therapeutics: adding salt. The findings, published in Small, address one of the biggest challenges facing modern gene medicine — getting fragile therapeutic material to the right place inside cells.

New Research Uncovers How Deadly Childhood Cancer Grows, Highlights Potential Therapies

In two new articles published in Nature journals, Ashok Kumar, Else and Philip Hargrove Endowed Professor of Drug Discovery at UHCOP and director of the Institute of Muscle Biology and Cachexia, explains how TAK1, a protein inside RMS cells, helps rhabdomyosarcoma tumors grow. His research also found that tumor cells rely on the IRE1α-XBP1 cellular stress-response pathway to survive. Blocking either TAK1 or IRE1α-XBP1 slowed tumor growth and helped cancer cells develop into normal muscle cells.

Archives