pharmacology

St. Louis College of Pharmacy and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are joining forces to find better, safer and more effective ways to use prescription medications to improve health. Researchers from the two institutions are collaborating to create the Center for Clinical Pharmacology. The center’s director will be Evan D. Kharasch, MD, PhD, the Russell D. and Mary B. Shelden Professor of Anesthesiology and professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at the School of Medicine.

Karen Seibert, PhD, research professor of pathology and immunology and of genetics, helps scientists connect and collaborate. Seibert, who does so with a mixture of warmth, optimism, enthusiasm and humor, is the director of Genomic Pathology Services at Washington University, a groundbreaking service that simultaneously analyzes many different genes to help patients and their doctors identify the best treatment options.

Neurons communicate at a synapseAs the nervous system develops early in life, it must create millions of synapses—small spaces between nerve cells across which the cells can communicate. Scientists have long speculated that these synapses are deliberately organized to place the structures that send messages on one cell directly across from the structures on another nearby nerve cell that receive those messages. School of Medicine researchers have provided the first experimental proof of this theory at the level of the nervous systems’ most fundamental unit: individual clusters of structures that send and receive signals.