Dr. Robert Vince, director of the Center for Drug Design at the University of Minnesota, gave the The University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy’s annual Charles W. Hartman Memorial Lecture Wednesday. The lecture, “Adventures in Drug Design,” took place at the Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts.
David D. Allen, dean of the pharmacy school, said the lecture was created to honor a former faculty member.
“The Charles W. Hartman Memorial Lecture was established in 1973 to honor our school’s third dean,” Allen said. “Dean Hartman’s tenure at the school was sadly cut short by an automobile accident in 1970.”
Before his death, Hartman accomplished many feats, including laying the groundwork for Faser Hall and the Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences on campus.
Vince is a medicinal chemist who focuses on different research topics, including drugs that combat HIV, Alzheimer’s, herpes, and skin cancer. Vince’s talk demonstrated his knowledge over a broad field of medicinal chemistry research.
“We are so thrilled that Dr. Vince agreed to be our Hartman lecturer this year,” Allen said. “Dr. Vince has an Ole Miss connection and worked as an assistant professor in the medicinal chemistry department in 1966.”
One of Vince’s most widely known accomplishments is his design of Abacavir, an HIV drug. Abacavir has been used for the global treatment of HIV and AIDs in adults and children. The royalties earned from this drug’s success have also allowed Vince and his research team to do other medicinal research.
Vince began by describing how his research early in his career on the herpes virus centered on working with nucleosides to counteract viruses’ replicating systems. He went on to say that this research allowed him to understand the operations of the HIV retrovirus.
Vince also recounted difficulties he and his research team had with patenting and licensing their drugs.
“The first AIDS drugs were approved even a lot faster than they would be today,” Vince said. “It would be a lot more difficult today to get drugs approved.”
Part of Vince’s message was that the inefficiencies of our licensing and patenting system can prove deleterious to important medicinal research.
Vince discussed some of his most recent and current work in Alzheimer’s and DNA damage, or skin cancer, research.
Jungeun Bae, a graduate Ph.D. student in the School of Pharmacy, spoke highly of Vince’s lecture.
Bae said the lecture inspired her to take part in pharmaceutical research.
“It was a very tremendous and amazing talk,” Bae said. “I found it very interesting that he correlated his lab work to a larger pharmaceutical setting. It gave me hope for my lab work so that I can develop a drug for a specific disease.”
