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St. Jude Family of Websites
Explore our cutting edge research, world-class patient care, career opportunities and more.
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Home
- Fundraising
Center for Translational Pharmacology (CTP)
The CTP facilitates and centralizes high-quality competitively funded peer-reviewed clinical pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic research in both clinical and pre-clinical models at St. Jude.
OVERVIEW
The CTP facilitates high-quality, competitively funded, peer-reviewed pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic translational research in clinical protocols. Its key functions include:
- Implement trials with pharmacokinetic studies by assisting with study design, building of standards orders and laboratory test procedures, and education of nursing and other clinical staff.
- Efficiently and properly collect, accession, process, and distribute pharmacokinetic samples for clinical trials.
- Develop or implement bioanalytical methods and validate their performance to ensure high-quality data, assay sensitivity, and assay specificity per FDA guidelines.
- Accurately analyze drug and metabolite concentrations or other relevant pharmacologic indices in biological samples.
- Develop and apply state-of-the-art biomedical pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modeling.
IMPACT
The CTP resources have been and will continue to expand research horizons and funding by providing outstanding expertise in conducting pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies, developing novel biomedical models, and providing the highest quality of data while performing these studies in a cost-effective manner.
As the PI of complex clinical trials, such as SJDAWN and SJMB12, I recognize the importance pharmacokinetic studies play in determining if the medicine is getting to our patient’s cancer in appropriate concentrations. Having the CTP, here at St Jude, means that not only do we get incredible in-house expertise to measure drug concentrations in our patients but that we also get state-of-the art sample receipt, processing, storage, and distribution whenever needed. This is an essential resource to support our trials and, most importantly, to help improve therapy.
Dr. Giles Robinson, Associate Member
Equipment
Major instrumentation includes:
- Waters Acquity UPLC H-Class TQD MS/MS system
- Waters UPLC-Xevo MS/MS system
- (2) SCIEX Triple Quad 5500 LC-MS/MS systems
- (2) SCIEX Triple Quad 3500 LC-MS/MS systems
The CTP has access to other Pharmaceutical Sciences division equipment, including:
- SCIEX QTRAP 7500+ SCIEX ZenoTOF 7600
- API 3200 LC/MS-MS system,
- Multiple HPLCs with fluorescence, electrochemical, a UV/diode array detection,
- Atomic absorption spectrometer
- R
Modeling and simulation activities use both computer workstations and the St. Jude supercomputing cloud.
- Software includes NONMEM (single & multithreaded configurations)
- ADAPT V
- PK-Sim a
- MoBi
- Monolix
- GastroPlus
- FORTRAN
- Matlab
- R
Services
Members access the CTP by requesting a consultation through the SRM2 portal. All clinical protocols will go through the CTP for Functions 1 and 2 (protocol implementation and sample acquisition) if they include PK/PD studies and access to analytical assay services (Functions 3 and 4). Study design/biomedical modeling (Function 5) is via discussion between investigators and CTP.
Directors
Markos Leggas, PhD
Director
Mark.Leggas@stjude.org
Clinton Stewart, PharmD
Associate Director
Clinton.Stewart@stjude.org
Kristine Crews, PharmD
Associate Director, PKSR
Kristine.Crews@stjude.org
Location
The Center for Translational Pharmacology (CTP) is located on the fifth floor of the Chili's Care Center (CCC), occupying 1,200 sq ft of space, and is integrated within the Division of Pharmaceutical Sciences, also located on the fifth floor of the CCC.