By MARTY LEVINE
After years of a career in chemical and pharmaceutical companies, Lisa Cencia Rohan’s doctoral education at Pitt, and a postdoctoral fellowship in immunology, led her to adopt her current emphasis on creating pharmaceutical products to address the global health needs of women.
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The next Staff Council Coffee and Conversation is scheduled for 11:30-noon, June 25, featuring Kevin Washo, senior vice chancellor for external relations, at 532 Alumni Hall.
Rohan — now a faculty member in the School of Pharmacy as well as the School of Medicine’s Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences — told the latest Staff Council Coffee and Conversation on June 9: “At that point I really became aware of the gaps in the field. That really encouraged me to stay (at Pitt) and to start my pharmaceutics laboratory. … Our mission was to develop better products for women.
“The reason I became interested in women’s health,” Rohan explained, was realizing “the significant gaps in understanding for women’s health products. I’ve always really been interested in discovery and doing impactful work, but this really showed me that there was a real big deficit in that area.
“I was at a point of my career where I really was interested in training the next generation of scientists,” she added. “To be in an academic environment gave me the opportunity to not only develop impactful products but also to mentor.”
She also found, she said, that “I learn more from my students and get challenged from my students every day. Part of the beauty of being here is working with the students, having them challenge you, challenging them back, and everything that they bring. They’ve really helped me to grow so much.”
Asked what has been her most impactful research — considering that Rohan and her laboratory team have developed more than 50 pharmaceutical products, including 14 as a result of basic science translated to clinical use — Rohan named two: a vaginal polymeric film and a nasal spray.
The first product, used for birth control, has been particularly effective in HIV prevention, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, Rohan said, “where women actually are disproportionately affected by the disease. The vaginal film is a meaningful product because it really intersects formulation science with user-designed product development. We’ve been able to develop a product that can actually give women control and empower them to take that control over their healthcare. Women seem to like it quite a bit and they find it easy to use, so that acceptability, the portability, the discreteness of the product really gives it an advantage for women.
“It’s also affordable, scalable and implementable in low-resource settings” — among sub-Saharan African women, who “actually are disproportionately affected by the disease and they’re really in need of a product that they can control to protect themselves. We’ve also applied it and other protective products for other STIs, as well as new products to protect from unintended pregnancy and other gynecological conditions.”
The nasal spray, she said, “is impactful in a different way,” delivering an antiviral medication: “Its antiviral activity is not only (against) HIV and herpes but also other respiratory viruses such as RSV flu, emerging diseases such as Ebola, hantavirus.” For the nasal spray, Rohan’s team has conducted three different clinical trials and is currently in the midst of a fourth study — a drug interaction trial which “has been very promising,” she said. “In that product what I see is a prospective consideration of what we may need in the future to control infectious disease and to help in global health and public health.
“We have much, much more work to do, lots to roll our sleeves up for, and we really need to understand more about women’s health, more about biology, anatomy, some of the simple things that we think we would know, [but] we really don’t understand completely.”
She also pointed out that she and colleagues are working to get the new Center for Pharmaceutical Product Development in the School of Pharmacy up and running. “We developed this … as a mechanism to really help others to translate their discovery science into impactful healthcare solutions. Not only on from a research standpoint and a development standpoint but also from a training standpoint, we see that as something that can impact researchers here in the School of Pharmacy.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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