Michael Dudley, PharmD, Class of 1980

Developing New Drugs

Michael Dudley, PharmD works to discover new drugs on the research end of the pipeline so that his pharmacy school classmates can use them on the patient care end. As vice president of drug development at Mpex Pharmaceuticals, this 1980 UCSF School of Pharmacy PharmD graduate is leading the development of drugs to fight infections that are increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

Responding to Infections

Studies now show that death rates for hospital patients with antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus infections have skyrocketed, as has the cost of treatment due to the need for complicated drug therapies and the problems of toxic reactions.

Combating this serious infection is the latest in Dudley's career-long work in the area of infections. "Early on I was fascinated to see that I could get the patient's organism -- via throat cultures and blood samples -- take it into a lab, test it to see which antibiotics worked against it, and choose the right drug for that infection. This fit UCSF's whole mantra of clinical pharmacy, which is trying to individualize therapy for a patient."

Revolutionizing Drug Treatments

In the future, he notes, the concept of individualized medicines will become even more refined and patient-specific as the emerging field of pharmacogenomics matches a drug treatment to a patient's genetic make-up. Indeed, one of Dudley's goals in joining a biotechnology firm was to help apply the genomic science revolution to create entirely new drugs against infectious microbes.

In biotech, Dudley leads cross-disciplinary teams. "I tell the chemist, if we want to give this drug once a day, you'll need to build a molecule that's going to have this pharmacokinetic property, to produce blood levels in people for this period of time, or the drug won't work."

Providing Unique Perspectives

Dudley sees important roles for pharmacists such as himself in discovering drugs. "Once you've stood at a patient's bedside in pharmacy school and you've been involved in selecting a therapy and watched it work, that changes you," he says. There are people here who are far more gifted than I am in terms of chemistry and designing molecules. But they're not clinicians. Being able to bring that front line patient care experience to an industry on the front lines of drug discovery makes for a more effective team."