Abilene Student Uses ACCP Scholarship to Advance Career Interest

• By Mark Hendricks
• July 20, 2018

Earlier this year, rising fourth-year student Alex Le from the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Pharmacy in Abilene was named one of three recipients of a $500 competitive scholarship to attend an American College of Clinical Pharmacists (ACCP) meta-analysis research training course. The course is offered annually by the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy’s Center for Health Outcomes & PharmacoEconomic Research, also known as the HOPE Center.

Le, the only student who received the scholarship, attended the three-day training program June 18-20 to learn more about designing, conducting and publishing meta-analyses. According to the ACCP website, the hands-on course integrates in-depth instruction and action-oriented workshops to teach participants to design protocols, perform effective searches for data sets, screen studies and extract data and conduct and interpret meta-analysis and meta-regression.

“Meta-analysis research is about answering larger questions that would otherwise not be answered by a single clinical trial,” Le explained. “Usually, this involves aggregating data from multiple studies and performing statistical analyses to answer these questions.”

As an example, Le and his collaborators — Mymoon Antony, Thao Nguyen, Michael Dean, Sajida Gowani, Saralinh Trinh and Irene La-Beck, Pharm.D. — are currently exploring the uses of PD-1 or PD-L1 inhibitors as a first-line therapy in non-small cell lung cancer. PD-1 and PD-L1 are proteins found on the surface of cells and are among a group of immunotherapy treatments currently being researched and developed to treat cancer.

Le said he became interested in meta-analysis when La-Beck, his mentor and an associate professor for the Department of Immunotherapeutics and Biotechnology on the Abilene campus, recruited him to perform a smaller meta-analysis with the same agents in melanoma during his first year of pharmacy school.

“I enjoyed the process of conducting a meta-analysis and how students can be involved in original research,” Le added.

As he prepares for his final year of pharmacy school, Le is continuing to work with La-Beck on a variety of laboratory and clinical research projects, and he also is president of The Research Interest Group, or TRIG, at the School of Pharmacy. He said attending the Meta-Analysis Training Program at the HOPE Center helped him sharpen skills he can apply to future research projects. Recently, Le used those skills to earn a citation in the guidelines for "The Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer consensus statement on immunotherapy for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC),” which was published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer.

Following graduation, Le hopes to pursue a career in the pharmaceutical industry that will allow him to work with clinical research, medical affairs, medical information or medical writing.

“These are the areas where I can best use my current expertise and experience,” he said. “I enjoy writing publications, clinical research and giving oral and poster presentations, and I think the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of potential job growth and has positions that could fully utilize my skillset.”