Professor Arto Urtti secures two major U.S. research grants

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, FDA, has granted major research grants to two projects of our Flagship’s PI, Professor Arto Urtti of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Eastern Finland.

The first project investigates the effects of eye drop preservatives on the absorption of medications from eye drops. The results of the study will help improve the understanding on how different preservatives affect local absorption of several drug substances, which will facilitate the development of new and generic eye drops and their evaluation by the FDA. Another of our Flagship’s PIs, Research Director Tetsuya Terasaki, is actively involved in the research as an expert, along with University Researcher Eva del Amo. The funding granted for the project is approximately one million dollars (approximately 950 000 €).

In the second project, a virtual calculation model is developed for predicting the concentrations of drug substances given as eye drops in eye tissues. This project is funded by the FDA as a collaboration with the American CFD research center, from which part of the funding is channeled to the University of Eastern Finland for Professor Urtti’s research group. In Kuopio, experimental research is carried out with eye suspensions. The results help the development of a virtual model in CFD, which in turn helps the FDA in the evaluation process of new and generic pharmaceuticals. The four-year funding allocated to Kuopio is around 350 000 €.

For more information, see https://www.uef.fi/en/article/professor-arto-urtti-secures-two-major-us-research-grants-to-university-of-eastern-finland