Dr Andrew Crowe

Biography

From 2015 I will be taking on the role of director of students and acdemic support within the school of Pharmacy, while teaching in areas of the preclinical sciences, such as Biochemistry, physiology, parasitology, microbiology and pharmacology. From 2015 I will be taking on the role of director of students and acdemic support within the school of Pharmacy, while teaching in areas of the preclinical sciences, such as Biochemistry, physiology, parasitology, microbiology and pharmacology.

Research Interest

I have 4 current interests: Firstly, transport characteristics of pharmaceutically relevant compounds both into the body and through barrier mechanisms within the body, such as through P-glycoprotein, BCRP and multiple resistance associated proteins, both present at the blood brain barrier, the blood cerebrospinal fluid barriers and the gastrointestinal tract. Secondly, I have an interest with iron and copper related mechanisms of metabolism, and changes in tumour growth. Thirdly, Bacterial adhesion to cells expressing active efflux proteins, and fourthly, mechanisms to induce active efflux proteins in human cells. In the last decade I have focused on transport of drugs through and into Caco-2 cells and MCF7 cells. Many of my publications to date have come from the use of the Caco-2 model. One major achievement was the isolation of a potent non-transformed sub clone of Caco-2 that has expanded my ability to quantitate differences between substrates for P-gp. Work using the Caco-2 cell model to examine drug attributes for the efflux proteins currently deals with the specifics of concentration dependence, affinity, uptake characteristics, comparative rate of efflux, pH dependence, and generally exploring selected drugs in detail to estimate the implications of being a P-gp substrate in a clinical setting, using in vitro tools. This may expand to efflux protein knockout mice in the future. I have initiated Apoptosis research to look for associations between caspase 3 and 8 increases during apoptosis and P-gp over-expression. In addition, I have completed other projects aimed at identifying patients with inflammatory bowel disease at an early stage, also based on P-gp related research, and I am currently examining associations of active efflux protein expression and bacterial binding in my in vitro gut model. Recent research has focused on amphetamine derivatives, digoxin derivatives, corticosteroids and antihistamines to determining whether P-gp is responsible for inter-patient variability in patients/overdose victims. Other interests include drug discovery using natural products, in particular extracts from marine organisms that may have some benefit in cancer chemotherapy.