Staff Profile
Dr Oisín Kavanagh
Lecturer in Pharmaceutics
- Email: oisin.kavanagh@ncl.ac.uk
- 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
Background
Oisín is a pharmacist and Lecturer in Pharmaceutics at Newcastle University School of Pharmacy.
Oisín joined Newcastle University as a lecturer in 2021. Prior to this, he studied Pharmacy at the University of Ulster where he spent his summers working on supramolecular probes and therapeutics for melanoma in Professor Callan's group. At graduation, he received the Gold medal from the Pharmaceutical Society of NI. He then completed his clinical training in his hometown of Derry before moving to the University of Limerick to complete his PhD. During this time he studied how to apply crystal engineering techniques to improve the physicochemical properties of drugs.
He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Michigan where he learned how to develop quantitative mathematical models for drug dissolution and solubility. After this, he returned to Ireland to take up a postdoctoral appointment funded by Janssen Pharmaceuticals and spent a brief period as a Lecturer at the School of Pharmacy at University College Cork before moving to Newcastle.
Research
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 (e.g., achlorhydria).
• Enabling industrial cocrystal upscale without the need for ternary phase diagrams: Despite much commercial and scientific interest in cocrystals, methods of cocrystal synthesis are often empirically determined. Although researchers can precisely identify the optimum reaction conditions to obtain pure cocrystals via ternary phase diagrams, they are cumbersome, and therefore, synthesis is often carried out by mechanochemical methods (when possible). For cocrystals to be utilised to their full potential in the pharmaceutical industry they must fit into existing processes, which are predominantly solvent based. Notwithstanding the advantages of solution-based methods to control particle size and morphology.
• High-load, multidrug powders that can be directly compacted into tablets: The development of high-drug load, multidrug tablets is an emerging challenge in the pharmaceutical industry, particularly in the context of multidrug formulations. This is seen most critically in the antiretroviral space (which commonly employs multidrug formulations of several antiretrovirals). In collaboration with Professor Calvin Sun, I have recently illustrated that cocrystallisation can enable direct compaction to produce robust USP quality tablets with high-drug loading.
Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ILUlsgwAAAAJ&hl=en
Teaching
Oisín teaches Pharmaceutics and Pharmacokinetics across the MPharm programme at Newcastle. He is also Exam lead for all exams on the programme and supervises a range of MRes and MPharm research projects.