Boehringer gives $1.25M to UConn pharmacy school

Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals of Ridgefield has given a lump-sum gift of $1.25 million to the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy to establish the nation's first endowed chair in mechanistic toxicology.

Research funded by the endowment has the potential to reduce both the time and cost of developing life-saving drugs by identifying toxicity in compounds at the molecular level, said Dr. Peter Farina, Boehringer's senior vice president of development. It also has the potential to reduce failures during clinical trial periods by identifying toxicity early on.

"If we are able to develop cellular or molecular systems that allow us to know in advance if a particular compound has, say, problems with liver toxicity, we can cull it out or try to fix the molecular structure," Farina said. "We now have the tool sets on the cellular, molecular and computer level that will give top researchers the capability for toxicity prediction."

The endowment should allow UConn to hire a nationally recognized researcher, scholar and teacher who has made significant contributions in the field of mechanistic toxicology to fill the chair - a field of study, UConn said, that is widely regarded as the next frontier for drug development and medical breakthroughs. "We hope to have the person in place by January 2007," said Robert L. McCarthy dean of the School of Pharmacy.