Thomas Schmittgen

Tom Schmittgen, Ph.D., joined the College of Pharmacy as a professor in the department of pharmaceutics. He assumed the role of department chair of pharmaceutics on Aug. 1, 2018. He is supported by the University of Florida’s Preeminence program with a focus on cancer therapeutics and drug discovery and development. He earned an undergraduate degree in pharmacy and graduate degrees in pharmaceutics from The Ohio State University and was a National Research Service Award (NIH) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California from 1992-95. He served on the faculty at Washington State University College of Pharmacy before returning to Ohio State in 2002. His research focuses on noncoding RNAs and cancer, with emphasis on the use of microRNAs as therapeutic or diagnostic agents. A paper he co-authored in 2001 describing the relative method of gene quantification has been cited over 36,000 times and was recently ranked by the international journal Nature as the 21st most-cited scientific article of all time. His lab was the first to establish a link between altered microRNA expression in pancreatic cancer and the intellectual property resulting from this work is the basis of the product miRInform Pancreas™, a biomarker of early pancreatic cancer development. Recently, he has focused his attention on the development of microvesicles as targeted drug delivery systems for the treatment of cancer.