Well attended when Pharmacy students presented degree projects

Friday 17 January, the Faculty of Pharmacy invited to the Master of Science Programme in Pharmacy 's annual Project Symposium, where the students present the results of their degree projects for families, friends and teachers. For the second year in a row, each student was also given the opportunity to do a minute-long presentation of their work in front of a packed auditorium ahead of the accompanying poster sessions.

“Our spontaneous reaction after listening to this year's 61 presentations is that they are consistently of incredibly high quality. The material is well planned and adapted to the target group and conveys just the right amount of information for this format. We also enjoy seeing so many teachers and relatives here to take part in the students' work,” state Jörgen Bengtsson and Lisa Fredriksson Carreras, Chair and Coordinator of the Program.

During the autumn, the students have carried out their projects in academia, industry and government. Several have also chosen to do their work abroad. One of them is Paloma van Setten, who traveled to the University of Aberdeen where she studied the possibility to express three enzymes deriving from Viola odorata with possible cyclization towards peptides, which if it proves feasible can be of great benefit to the pharmaceutical industry.

“I spent three months in a research group at the Institute of Medical Sciences, where my days consisted of lab work, articles, seminars and writing on my degree project. It was an independent process where the results are now being developed in a collaboration between Uppsala University and the University of Aberdeen,” says Paloma van Setten, who will next head to Stockholm for Work placement training at Apoteket AB.

Rouzi Kouki carried out her work at AstraZeneca's site in Södertälje, where the company expects to increase its production of the drug Symbicort Turbuhaler by 40 percent. In parallel, AstraZeneca aims to reduce its waste by 10 percent during the same period, and Rouzi Kouki has participated in developing a waste management method that is expected to reduce the consumption of corrugated cardboard by 64.4 percent.

“I recently presented the outcome of my degree project to management personnel at AstraZeneca and they aim to begin work on implementing the results shortly. I myself have received an offer from another company to participate in a year-long assignment with focus on drug management next year, which of course feels incredibly inspiring,” says Rouzi Kouki.

Maja Sikström carried out her project at the Department of Pharmacy’s research environment of Molecular Pharmaceutics, where she has explored the possibility to increase the scope for oral administration of peptide-based drugs, a highly topical area as the challenges surrounding peptide drugs mean that they are currently mainly administered via injection.

“When adding lipid-based formulations, we have seen that they both provide protection against intestinal enzymes and can generate permeation enhancers via lipid digestion in the intestine. These are interesting results, although they require continued permeability assessment and validation of controls,” says Maja Sikström, who will next take up a position as a research assistant.

Per Manell's Award for best thesis was presented to Thelma Leifsdotter Ilbäcken, who carried out her project at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry's research environment in Preparative medicinal chemistry. Well-deserved honorable mentions were awarded to Sara Bakhaya, who in her work has developed ChatGPT models for communication training, and to Isabella Mattsson, who from an environmental perspective studied regional treatment recommendations for depression and anxiety.

Text & photo: Magnus Alsne