Staff Profile
Dr Oisín Kavanagh
Lecturer in Pharmaceutics
- Personal Website: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ILUlsgwAAAAJ&hl=en
- Address: School of Pharmacy
Faculty of Medical Sciences
Newcastle University
King George VI Building
NE1 7RU
Background
To uncover pharmaceutical problems, Oisín collaborates with a wide range of disciplines, including pharmacists, pharmaceutical scientists, chemists, and engineers at internationally renowned pharmacy departments and at multinational pharmaceutical companies. This has led to a diverse range of projects built around the central theme of investigating the important pharmaceutical characteristics of solubility and mechanical behaviour which target key scientific challenges.
Oisín is keen to hear from any student (national or international) for PhD studies, or from experienced researchers who wish to pursue a postdoctoral appointment in one of my research areas. Get in touch and let me know how I can help you work at Newcastle!
Research Interests
• Drug solubility determinations relevant to new contexts: Despite its apparent simplicity, there is much misunderstanding around the concept of solubility. This has been discussed in a recent consensus statement which highlighted that aqueous drug solubility is often reported as a single unit and often without solution pH, ionic strength and – if you're particularly unlucky – temperature data. The solid phase remaining after these measurements is also seldom reported. As such, there is currently a lack of data exploring the solubility of drugs in solvents such as urine. My preliminary data has illustrated that this may enable the greater predictive capacity of pharmacokinetic models for crystalluria.
• Mechanistic understanding of cocrystal solubility behaviour for better PBPK prediction: Current approaches to cocrystal solubility prediction have not accounted for solution activity which would be expected to change drastically after meals. Further, there is little work exploring the effect of dose number on cocrystal behaviour. A better fundamental understanding of cocrystal behaviour in these contexts can enable better predictive capacity and may enable formulation design for new therapeutic contexts.
Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ILUlsgwAAAAJ&hl=en
Oisín teaches Pharmaceutics and Pharmacokinetics across the MPharm programme at Newcastle. He is also assessment lead for all exams on the programme and supervises a range of PhD, MRes and MPharm reserach projects.
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Articles
- Haskins MM, Kavanagh ON, Sanii R, Khorasani S, Chen J-M, Zhang Z-Y, Dai X-L, Ren B-Y, Lu T-B, Zaworotko MJ. Tuning the Pharmacokinetic Performance of Quercetin by Cocrystallization. Crystal Growth and Design 2023, (ePub ahead of Print).
- Cogo Machado T, Kavanagh ON, Goncalves Cardoso S, Rodriguez-Hornedo N. Synchronization of Cocrystal Dissolution and Drug Precipitation to Sustain Drug Supersaturation. Molecular pharmaceutics 2022, 19(8), 2765-2775.