Each month, the editors of three of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutic’s (ASPET) journals choose who they call their Highlighted Trainee Authors. These early-career scientists are recognized for their innovative research published in The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Drug Metabolism and Disposition, and Molecular Pharmacology. This feature showcases selected young scientists, demonstrates what drives them and reveals why pharmacology is important to them. This month we are featuring the March 2025 Highlighted Trainee Authors.
Pooja Hegde
“Ever since I was a child, understanding how drugs worked and why certain drugs and severe side-effects while other drugs didn’t always puzzle me,” says Pooja Hegde, a Drug Metabolism-Pharmacokinetics (DMPK) Advisor. This curiosity laid the foundation of her academic journey.
Hegde started her undergraduate studies to become a pharmacist to get these answers. Then to understand drug mechanisms and drug interactions, she pursued her graduate studies in medicinal chemistry, gaining more understanding of the field and her interests leaning more toward DMPK. Her post-doctoral training was focused on metabolism and transporter mediated drug-drug interactions, which helped put the mechanistic basis of drug interactions and adverse reactions in perspective.
When asked how she hopes her work will impact the field of pharmacology, she says, “While the preclinical DMPK field is constantly developing, there are still a few challenges with regards to drug metabolizing enzymes and drug-drug interactions (DDIs). I hope my research will help address a few gaps in the field and will improve the in-vitro to in-vivo correlation abilities to have a better understanding of risk prediction and to enhance screening of compounds for DDIs early in the discovery stage.”
From a career standpoint, Pooja’s long-term vision is to be able to successfully promote the discovery and development of at least one drug that has clinical potential to combat diseases with a mild toxicity profile.
For Hegde, being published in Drug Metabolism and Disposition is a great privilege. Her postdoctoral research resulted in three different manuscripts, all of which have been published in ASPET journals. “I have been very fortunate for the opportunity to present my work on such a platform where other esteemed scientists in the field share their remarkable science. From spending days looking through ASPET journals for understanding the scientific progress and gaps in the field to contributing to this wonderful journal, I feel like I have come a long way in my career.”
Ana Catya Jiménez-Torres
“I fell in love with Biology when I was in high school,” says Ana Catya Jiménez-Torres, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of South Carolina. While studying for her undergraduate degree, she participated in a “Scientific Summer” program, and that’s when she knew that she wanted to pursue research.
Jiménez-Torres’ passion for science propelled her to apply and win various national and international internships. Early in her career, she had the opportunity to conduct research in different labs and connect with expert scientists who became mentors who always encouraged her to reach her professional goals.
When she started her doctoral studies, her interest in neuropharmacology and neurotoxicology increased. In 2020, she obtained her PhD in Toxicology from the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados at Mexico City. Her graduate research contributions focused on the regulation of glutamatergic neurotransmission in the brain-liver axis in liver disease. After that, she continued expanding her knowledge in neuroscience field, with a main interest in developing compounds with therapeutic benefits for a specific population, HIV-1 positive patients.
“The basis of my current research is identifying specific compounds that interact with unique sites on the dopamine transporter, diminishing the Tat-dopamine transporter interaction, thus the dopamine transporter may back to physiological functions promoting the attenuation of neurocognitive deficits in HIV- infection. The importance of this research addresses the identification of potential therapeutic agents to normalize dopamine dynamics in the brain to treat neurocognitive disease in HIV patients.”
Over the last seven years, Jiménez-Torres has built her knowledge on how different drugs may alter synaptic neurotransmission, the molecular mechanism of action and underlining specific targets to provide new insights on promising therapeutic interventions. Ultimately, her long-term goal includes becoming an independent researcher and developing a comprehensive understanding of emerging knowledge about the role of cerebellar neurotransmission on drug rewarding and seeking.
According to Jiménez-Torres, being published in a scientific journal, like The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, is an amazing platform to make findings known to the world.
Victoria Saca
Victoria Saca is a 5th year PhD student in Tom Sakmar’s Lab at Rockefeller University—where she’s working on G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and proteolysis targeting chimeras (PROTACs)—and a member of the Tri-Institutional PhD Program in Chemical Biology.
While she has always been interested in science, it was during a summer undergraduate research program with Dr. Travis Bethel at Providence College that made Victoria realize that she loved being in the lab. That passion first led her to participate in a research program in Samie Jaffrey’s Lab at Weil Cornell Medicine, where she worked to discover self-modifying ribozymes in the pursuit of self-modifying RNA-tag that would use endogenous substrates.
When Saca started her thesis research during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, work was still restricted, and they had a hard time getting reagents and supplies like microtiter plates. But as things started to take off, she realized that her work might have an impact on PROTAC drug discovery and therapeutics. For Victoria and her team, showing the feasibility of PROTAC technology to target a large family of proteins such as GPCRs has been an exciting and rewarding project.
“I hope that my research helps to further expand the use of PROTAC technology to target GPCRs and other membrane proteins. Although targeted protein degradation methods (TPD) have been applied to a few GPCRs, my work suggests that TPD methods might be useful more broadly to suppress constitutively active GPCRs, for example.”
Later this year, Saca plans to defend her dissertation. From there, she hopes to pursue additional postdoc training and a career in drug discovery, maybe at an innovative start-up. Her goal is to leverage chemical tools and technologies to develop new drug discovery programs.
For Saca, “it is an honor to publish in Molecular Pharmacology alongside numerous other incredible scientists. Throughout my PhD, I have read many articles from ASPET journals as well as attended an ASPET conference, and I am excited to contribute to this scientific community, which is so vital for drug discovery.”
