Thomas P Davis, PhD, University of Arizona, USA
Editorial Board Member
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Dr Thomas P. Davis is Professor of Medical Pharmacology in the College of Medicine and Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the College of Medicine, at the University of Arizona. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology from Loyola University (1973), his M.Sc. in physiology from the University of Nevada (1975) and his Ph.D. in physiology and Biochemistry from the University of Missouri (1978). He carried out postdoctoral training at Abbott Pharmaceutical Company as a development chemist in the therapy monitoring venture (TDx) group before joining the UA faculty in November of 1980. Dr Davis is an expert in the delivery of drugs across the blood-brain barrier having been continuously funded by the N.I.H. since 1981. He has published more than 240 peer-reviewed research articles, has served on five consecutive N.I.H., brain disorders clinical neurosciences and acute neural injury and epilepsy study sections and has served on several other N.S.F., Welcome Trust and V.A. study sections.
Dr. Davis' laboratory has spent the past 38 years actively studying the challenges of central nervous system (CNS) drug delivery in disease and acute / chronic pain states. His research focus is to develop “state of the art” methods/procedures/tools/models for quantifying/studying the in vivo integrity and modulation of the blood brain barrier/neurovascular unit (BBB/NVU), and multi-drug transporters, such as P-glycoprotein (mdr1a;P-gp) and OATP 1A4, as altered by disease states associated with brain injury (stroke/hypoxia/anoxia) and acute, chronic and migraine pain. Dr. Davis remains active and dedicated to the mission of maintaining a rigorous research training program in drug delivery which leads to advances and discoveries such as P-gp transporter trafficking and occludin, claudin-5, tight junction (TJ) proteins altered by acute/chronic pain and opioid drug - drug interactions leading to BBB/NVU dysregulation. His reward is educating and training his undergraduates (44 to date), graduate (17 to date), post-doctoral, assistant and research professors (32 to date), to advance the BBB/NVU field. In the course of his research into the molecular, biochemical and physiological mechanisms associated with maintenance and disruption of the blood-brain barrier, endothelial cell TJ proteins and specific drug transporters, Dr Davis is proud to be cited by his peers for “paradigm shifting” discoveries and “meritorious mentoring” of the next generation of brain barrier researchers. In short, “we must understand how to get the drug into the brain so that we can treat diseases of the brain”.