Athens, Ga. – Glenn Prestwich, Presidential Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and special presidential assistant for faculty entrepreneurism at the University of Utah, will present a seminar March 6 at 3:30 p.m. in Room 101 of the Pharmacy South building. His talk on “Harnessing Hyaluronic Acid: From Cell Therapy to Reducing Inflammation” is free and open to the public.
Prestwich’s research interests are highly translational and include prominent interactions with physicians and companies tasked with developing new therapies. His work includes developing therapeutic applications of anti-cancer lysophospholipids, anti-inflammatory sulfated polysaccharides and hyaluronan-derived synthetic extracellular matrices for 3-D cell culture and regenerative medicine.
From 1977-1996, he worked as a professor of chemistry, biochemistry and cell biology at the University at Stony Brook. He also was director of the New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Medical Biotechnology where he co-founded Clear Solutions Biotechnology Inc. to commercialize hyaluronan biomaterials.
From 2001-2004, he served as chief scientific officer of Echelon Biosciences Inc., in Salt Lake City, Utah, which he co-founded in 1997. From 2004-2005, he served as chief scientific officer of Sentrx Surgical Inc., which he co-founded. The company later became Carbylan BioSurgery Inc., in Sunnyvale, Calif., a venture syndicate-funded drug/device company with a focus on devices for scar-free healing and wound repair.
He is a recipient of Alfred P. Sloan Research and Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar awards and was honored with the 1998 Paul Dawson Biotechnology Award of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy. He was elected as a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2005 and was selected as a Top 100 Venture Entrepreneurs in Utah in 2005.
Prestwich graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1970. He earned a doctorate in chemistry from Stanford University in 1974 and spent three years as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow, first at Cornell University and then at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi, Kenya.
For more information on the College of Pharmacy, see http://www.rx.uga.edu/.
