Mr. Navin Kumar Loganadan, a PhD student at the Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya (UM) became the only Malaysian selected from among 20 scientists around the world to participate in the Novartis Next Generation Scientist (NGS) 2016 Program when the selection results were announced on 26 February 2016.
The NGS Program is an intensive 3 month internship program conducted in Basel, Switzerland for talented and motivated research scientists from emerging countries. This program is designed to foster both their scientific and professional development.
“Under the supervision of Novartis mentors, I will be further investigating the response to sulphonylurea therapy in the European population which would allow me to compare the findings with the Malaysian subjects. The outcome of this research is hoped to help in the optimisation of Type 2 Diabetes management in Malaysia,” said Navin.
Sulphonylurea is a medicine given to Type 2 Diabetes patients and it helps to increase the production of insulin from their pancreas which would then bring down the glucose levels in the blood.
As a clinical pharmacist, Navin was actively involved in research on diabetes and was the pioneered the Diabetes Medication Therapy Adherence Clinic (DMTAC) service in Hospital Kuala Lumpur (HKL) in 2009 which helps Type 2 Diabetes patients attain optimum medication adherence and glycemic target.
He was awarded the Young Investigator Award 2009 by the National Diabetes Institute (NADI), Malaysia back then for his research work on DMTAC.
At present, for his PhD project, he intends to identify the clinical and genetic predictors for sulphonylurea drug response in the Malaysian Type 2 Diabetes population.
“My research interest is driven by the fact that the percentage of patients who achieve the glycemic targets are relatively low despite the wide access to drugs and diabetes care in Malaysia,” he added.
Navin completed part of this project at the New York University School of Medicine under the Diabetes Research Program in 2015. He also published a review article entitled ‘Genetic markers predicting sulphonylurea treatment outcomes in type 2 diabetes patients: current evidence and challenges for clinical implementation’ in The Pharmacogenomics Journal (Publisher: Nature Publishing Group, Impact Factor: 4.229) in 2016.
Navin is doing his PhD under the supervision of Dr. Hasniza Zaman Huri from the Department of Pharmacy and Associate Prof. Dr. Shireene Ratna D B Vethakkan from the Department of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, UM.
He obtained both his Bachelor of Pharmacy (Honours) and Master of Clinical Pharmacy from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM).
He is a registered pharmacist with the Pharmacy Board of Malaysia and practiced as a clinical pharmacist in HKL prior to joining UM to pursue his PhD under the scholarship from the Ministry of Health, Malaysia.
By Rohaizan Ramli
