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Biography
I graduated in 2012 with a First Class honours degree in Medicinal Chemistry from Trinity College, Dublin. As part of my degree I spent three months working in the Melnyk group at Université Lille 2 developing inhibitors of the sigma-1 protein - a potential target for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease.
I then completed an MRes Drug Discovery and Development at Imperial College, London, graduating with distinction in September 2013. Here I worked under the joint supervision of Dr. Chris Braddock and Dr. Rudiger Woscholski developing selective inhibitors and molecular probes for protein tyrosine phosphatases.
In September 2013, I joined Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) for Targeted Therapeutics and Formulation Sciences. As part of the CDT program I completed two mini-projects before starting my PhD project in June 2014.
Research Summary
PhD Title: Formulation of taste masked fixed dose combinations for paediatric administration using hot melt extrusion
Supervisors: Dr. Min Zhao, Prof. Duncan Craig, Dr. Catherine Tuleu, Barry Aldous (Pfizer), Claire Forbes (Pfizer)
The vast majority of drugs on the market today have poor organoleptic properties which, unless correctly formulated can be very unpalatable, especially for children. My work focuses on the development of hot melt extrusion as a novel platform technology for taste masking of bitter drugs. In particular we aim to use hot-melt extrusion to develop an age appropriate taste masked, fixed dose combination of the four first-line drugs for the treatment of TB to simplify treatment of paediatric TB and improve patient compliance.