For Liyun Yuan, working in drug design and delivery is one of the best ways to help patients. And Yuan, a fifth year student at the USC School of Pharmacy, is definitely into helping patients – she has an M.D. from China.

Yuan came to the USC laboratory of Dr. Wei-Chiang Shen, the John A. Biles Professor in Pharmaceutical Sciences, during one of her rotations for her Ph.D – and she never left.

She was fascinated by the issue faced by many patients with chronic diseases: many of the large molecule therapies that they need to survive require continual injections. "It increases cost and decreases patient compliance – and their outcomes aren't good," she notes.

So Yuan wanted to work on a way to modify the drugs so they could be injected, perhaps once a week instead of daily. She published her work on lipidizing Octreotide, a hormone inhibitor that helps stop growth hormones in endocrine tumors and is used in gastrointestinal bleeding, in the prestigious journal Pharmaceutical Research.

For her work lipidizing interferon, a potent anti-viral agent used for treating Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C, she was awarded an American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Graduate Student Award in Drug Delivery and Pharmaceutical Technology honor in 2006. By lipidizing, "we found interferon was not only sustained in the blood, but it also targeted the liver, which minimizes the side effects and maximizes overall effectiveness," she says.

Yuan, who juggles her research with her roles as wife and mother, has also been awarded the Krown Fellowship, the most prestigious award given to graduate students at the USC School of Pharmacy. She credits her mentor, Dr. Shen, with guiding her to such success in the lab. Her ultimate goal: an academic post. "I wanted to get closer to disease treatment, and this is about as close as you can get."