Construction on west wing of The University of Mississippi’s School of Pharmacy’s Thad Cochran Research Center is almost complete. Workers are now adding finishing touches, such as painting the walls and installing railings for the stairs.The classrooms and laboratories are mostly complete but empty of furnishings and equipment.
These classrooms and laboratories in the Cochran Center West will enable the pharmacy school to have space for FDA approved clinical trials and more room for plant specimen research, which focuses on natural products being developed into more useful products.
This is exactly the kind of pharmacology in which freshman pharmacy student Hannah Adair would like to become more involved.
“I am really excited for the future generations of pharmacy students to be able to use these incredible resources that The University of Mississippi will now be able to provide,” Adair said.
The Thad Cochran Research Center is the country’s only university-affiliated research center. The center facilitates pharmacy students in discovering and developing pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals from natural products. The existing Thad Cochran Center, now being called Thad Cochran Center East, is located on University Avenue, right across from the Grove, and was built in 1992, first occupied in 1995 and completed in 2000.The construction for the Thad Cochran Center West broke ground in 2011 and is expected to be completed later this spring.
Don Stanford, assistant director of the Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, explained the original building was designed for drug discovery while the new wing is designed to move those discoveries towards commercialization.
“It’s not just more space; it’s more opportunities to advance UM’s research enterprise,” Stanford said.
The expansions will nearly double the school’s research space.
The new building houses the National Center for Natural Products Research and will include an area for clinical trials, an expanded botanical specimen repository, laboratories for scale-up synthesis and laboratories for expansion of discovery efforts for natural products, stated Erin Parsons Garrett, public relations representative for the university’s School of Pharmacy.
“These unique capabilities make Thad Cochran Research Center West extremely state-of-the-art and unlike any other facilities in our region,” Garrett said.
