“We must acknowledge...that the most important, indeed, the only, thing we have to offer our students is ourselves. Everything else they can read in a book or discover independently.”
Daniel C. Tosteson, MD, dean for faculty of medicine from 1977-1997, Harvard Medical School
From New England Journal of Medicine 1979
Training Pioneers in Therapeutic Sciences
The Therapeutics Graduate Program focuses on pharmacology, toxicology and drug discovery, emphasizing research in both HMS labs and in real-world internships. Our goal is to provide students with the intellectual tool kit and practical skills necessary to be productive researchers in therapeutics discovery throughout the workforce.
The certificate program offers rigorous, multidisciplinary training relevant to identifying and developing novel therapeutics, understanding and investigating mechanisms of drug action, analyzing the reasons for clinical failures, and developing new compounds and applying them in preclinical and clinical studies to improve the treatment of disease.
This program will provide students with all the tools and skills necessary for these aims, including quantitative skills and modern cutting-edge techniques. This involves elucidating and understanding biological pathways and therapeutic mechanisms, understanding adverse effects to limit toxicity, identifying novel therapeutic targets, and characterizing the pharmacologic profiles (pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics) of new compounds. Students will understand the social implications and impact of these activities, and we therefore aim to link this training to industrial, clinical, and regulatory activities and to encourage students to consider their studies in a society-wide context.
Frank Obeng Addae
Program: Biological Sciences in Public Health
Hometown: Dunkwa-On-Offin, Central Region, Ghana
PI(s): Manoj Duraisingh
I am very passionate about leadership, teaching, mentoring, volunteering, and community service. As part of my volunteering activities, I mentor several African students seeking graduate school opportunities in the USA. I have co-founded a foundation called Mofra Literacy Foundation that aims to provide financial support to brilliant but needy students in my hometown in Ghana.
Malaria is one of the leading causes of death of children under five years in Africa, where I come from. With the emergence of resistance against the current antimalarial drugs, there is a need to identify new antimalarials with novel mechanisms of action and less susceptibility to resistance. For my PhD, I am interested in exploring Plasmodium histone deacetylases as novel targets for antimalarial drugs. I am very passionate about identifying novel therapeutics to combat infectious diseases and other non-communicable diseases such as cancer...
