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Washington, D.C. — Raymond L. Woosley, MD, PhD, associate dean for clinical research at Georgetown University Medical Center, will be honored with the 2001 Harry Gold Award, to be presented March 31 by the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) at its annual meeting in Orlando, Fla.
"The Harry Gold Award recognizes Dr. Woosley’s many contributions to research and medical education," said Sam Enna, PhD, president of ASPET and professor and chair of the Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Therapeutics at the University of Kansas Medical Center. "Not only has his work resulted in the development of new therapeutics, such as Allegra, it has yielded important new discoveries about drug mechanisms responsible for therapeutic responses and toxicities that are guiding drug discovery programs today."
Woosley’s research efforts have focused on the clinical pharmacology of anti-arrhythmic drugs. He helped to provide the scientific underpinning of the Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial (CAST), a trial that began in 1987 with 27 participating sites nationwide, to test the use of antiarrhythmic drug therapy to decrease mortality. This trial has played a pivotal role in increasing awareness of the fact that antiarrhythmic drugs can both suppress and cause cardiac arrhythmias.
Woosley conducted groundbreaking research on the medication Seldane—a popular antihistamine introduced in 1985 that was withdrawn from the market after reports that taking it in conjunction with certain drugs could cause potentially fatal irregular heartbeats. His work led to the discovery of fexofenadine, a safer version of Seldane that is now marketed under the brand name Allegra. Allegra was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1996.
More recently, Woosley’s research interests have expanded to include studies designed to explore the reason that women appear to be more susceptible than men to potentially fatal arrhythmias caused by a number of drugs. Woosley and his colleagues at Georgetown published an article in the March 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association finding that women may be more at risk for drug-induced arrhythmia during menstruation and ovulation.
Woosley has been the leading academic proponent for the recent establishment of a nationwide network of Centers for Education and Research in Therapeutics (CERTS) and has served on a number of National Institutes of Health, Veterans Administration, and Food and Drug Administration advisory committees. He has been an associate editor of
Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, a joint publication of ASPET and the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, of which he is immediately past present.
The award was established in 1977 in honor of Harry Gold, professor emeritus of clinical pharmacology at Cornell University Medical College, who died in 1972.
ASPET is a scientific society for pharmacologists in the United States. Pharmacology is the scientific discipline concerned with defining the manner in which drugs and other chemicals interact with animal and human tissues for the purpose of developing safer and more effective therapeutics. The Society’s 4,500 members are involved in basic and clinical research in academia, industry and government.
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