Research focus: Herb-drug interactions, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, diabetes (prevention, diagnosis, and treatment), obesity, and plant derived therapeutics

Biography:

Dr. Patel started her scientific journey as an intern at the Diabetes Discovery Platform studying towards her Master’s degree in obesity research and went on to complete her PhD degree in Clinical Pharmacology. She then assumed the role of Senior Research Technologist in April of 2012. She has 9 years’ working experience in diabetes research involving rodent models using diet-induced obese, diabetic db/db and C57BL/6 mouse models and the Wistar rodent model. Her work comprises of in vitro as well as in vivo studies, which include the planning and successful execution of multiple projects including bioavailability studies (C3A, C2C12, 3T3-L1, CaCo2), cell viability, cytotoxicity, and assessment of bioactivity. Furthermore, she has experience in gene expression, immunohistochemical labelling of processed tissue sections, processing of animal tissues, as well as capture and assessment of immunohistochemically stained sections, fluorescent imaging, analysis, and quantification. Her expertise includes project management (running multiple projects concurrently), animal husbandry, post-mortem tissue harvesting, venipuncture, bile duct cannulation, glucose tolerance tests and oral gavage of plant extracts and/or drugs. She also has experience in in vitro tools such as recombinant cytochrome P450 enzymes, as well as pharmacokinetic in vivo studies.