The fourth Pan-Pacific International Partnership Conference on Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences, jointly organized by the USC School of Pharmacy and its affiliated pharmacy schools in Japan, was held Feb. 22-23 in Nagoya, Japan.

The conference strives to strengthen research in the pharmaceutical and life sciences through international cooperation and collaboration. The event, held at a different university each year, was hosted this time by the Nagoya City University.

Ronald Alkana, professor at the School of Pharmacy who serves on the advisory board of the conference, was featured in a presentation on treatments for alcohol disorders. Alkana showed his lab’s research findings on the identification of molecular targets in the brain that may lead to future pharmacotherapeutic agents for alcohol abuse.

Alkana’s talk was part of the “Drug Action and Therapy” section of the conference moderated by Paul Beringer, associate professor at the School of Pharmacy. Beringer also presented a poster at the conference detailing his work on optimizing the use of pharmacologic agents in the treatment of cystic fibrosis.

Other School of Pharmacy faculty displayed posters highlighting the work from their labs and the labs of their collaborators. The presenters included assistant professors Tien Ng on the effect of dopamine on renal circulation on patients with heart failure; Bangyan Stiles on new therapeutic targets based on the deletion of liver PTEN, a gene found in almost all cells of the body; and Clay Wang on the reengineering of E. coli to create a cancer drug.

The annual event was organized by eight universities, with the addition this year of the University of Sydney in Australia.