$146,000 grant to buy instruments for new class on topicals development

Topical health care products are a growing market that is projected to reach an annual value of more than $20 billion globally by 2020. University of Rhode Island College of Pharmacy professors are tapping into that market, providing students with hands-on training opportunities developing and manufacturing topicals, thanks to a recent Champlin Foundation grant awarded to the College of Pharmacy.

Assistant Professor Jie Shen, who has extensive experience in developing and testing topicals, is the principal investigator of the project to purchase state-of-the-art equipment for the production and quality control tests of topicals. The $146,000 grant will go toward purchasing new instruments, including the Unguator Q and the Microfluidizer. Both are cutting-edge technologies that are unavailable elsewhere for educational purposes in Rhode Island. The Microfluidizer®️ is a particle-size reduction system that can also be used for other types of nano medicines.

A Franz Diffusion apparatus, Rheometer and an Osmometer will also be purchased using the funds. These three pieces of equipment are used for evaluating the properties and quality of topical products. The team hopes to have all of the new instruments purchased and installed for use by the Fall 2019 Semester.

The instruments will be at the center of existing courses and independent undergraduate research projects. They will also be used for continuing education opportunities for local pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists.

The new instruments will compliment equipment like the particle size analyzer and the Karl Fischer Coulometer that were purchased using funds from a previous Champlin Grant in 2014. That equipment is for producing powders, which can be used in creating topicals.

Like the powder equipment, the new topical equipment will be kept in the Pharmaceutics Core and Teaching laboratories in Avedisian Hall. Shen is joined on the project by pharmacy faculty members Saleh Allababidi, Xinyuan Chen, Samantha Meenach and Clinton Chichester, co-director of the Patient Simulation Laboratory and a principle of the Pharmaceutical Development Institute on the lower level of Avedisian Hall.