Introduction

Who am I?

My name is Benjamin A. Kuzma and I love pharmacokinetics (PK). I recently received my Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences in 2020 from Long Island University, right before COVID-19 took over life as we knew it. My first day as a postdoctoral fellow was working from home and doing so for the foreseeable future. I couldn’t remember the last time I was away from the lab for more than three days, so this certainly would take some getting used to. Several months ago, we were lucky enough to get back into the lab (with proper PPE and abiding by MGH Covid protocols, of course) and I have dived into the imaging world to quantify drug concentrations within tissues.

Where did my love of pharmacokinetics come from?

When I was growing up, I frequently asked myself, “Why does this happen?” or “How does that happen?”. Surely, these questions don’t instantly point to a science-based Ph.D. or even a career in science. However, for me, it was something personal that really drove me in the pursuit of answering these questions. When I was around 10-11 years old, I had a horrible asthma attack that led me to be hospitalized. At the time, the only thing I was focused on was whether I could make it to hockey practice at 7 pm. Of course, I didn’t make it to practice, and I couldn’t be more upset since that was my life. My life was to eat, sleep, and breathe (to the best of my ability) hockey.

While I was in the hospital, twice-a-day a nurse gave me medication, and I magically began to feel better. I thought to myself, “How in the world does this work?” and from that time on, I became fascinated with how the human body functioned. I began asking myself the following questions: How does the body normally function? What happens when it gets sick? How does medication work? In the pursuit of answering these questions, I began to think about how these drugs might work. One of the sillier hypotheses was that whenever I took ibuprofen for a headache, the drug itself knew exactly where my pain was and cured it almost instantaneously. At that point in my mind, there was no other explanation between taking the drug and feeling better. I came to understand later that there are COX1 and COX2 receptors all over the body to which the active pharmaceutical ingredient (aka drug) binds to and subdues pain. While my teenage self was not worthy of a publication with this hypothesis, this fueled my curiosity in this research space.

While studying at Assumption University, the frustration and satisfaction that came with conducting experiments was my own drug. Even though these experiments had well-characterized outcomes, I usually found myself trying to figure out why they were different whenever I had results that were not expected. While I was in the course Cellular & Molecular Biology, I had re-done a PCR experiment well over 8 times, even on the weekend. During this course, I realized that I wanted to do this for the rest of my life – conduct experiments, analyze data, and solve the next question or problem. The limited official experimental design, data analysis, and the lack of publications ultimately limited what I could do next without more education. For most of my collegiate career, I thought that I wanted to be a Pharmacist. However, while conducting experiments, I realized it was the drug development aspects I was so captivated by. This then ultimately opened my eyes to pursuing a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences, focusing on PK. This was immensely important to me because not only was I the first to finish college, I would be the first to obtain my Ph.D. I knew that this would be a very tough task (less than 3% of the population has a Ph.D.), but I knew I could do it with the incredible support system at home. Very quickly, I had studied for weeks to take the GRE and apply to several Ph.D. programs during my senior year at Assumption. Most were straight up no’s while others redirected me to apply to their master’s programs, which accepted me shortly thereafter. This was exciting, but I wanted to jump right into a Ph.D. program and get the ball rolling on my scientific career (and also not take out more student loans – no one likes those!). Enter Long Island University. 

It was Spring Weekend at Assumption University and Saturday morning. I woke up to an email from LIU; knowing that my application was successfully submitted weeks ago, I knew my fate would soon be revealed. I clicked on the email and the PDF loaded to say, “Congratulations on your acceptance to the Ph.D. program in Pharmaceutical Science at Long Island University” ( Of course, I am paraphrasing since Assumption deleted our emails when they upgraded their servers for University status). I had to pinch myself to make sure I was not dreaming. I could not believe it – I was going to grad school to study my lifelong drug development dream. I think I had tears of joy – I ran down the hall yelling while everyone else was not waking up for another few hours. I called my parents to tell them, and they were ecstatic, but they were slightly hesitant since I had called so earlier – they worried I was in trouble. So in the Summer of 2015, after I finished my undergrad degree, I headed to The Big City to start my dream of obtaining a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences. 

What was my PhD research about?

When I first started at LIU, I had rotations through the labs to see which I wanted to join. After about a month of doing rotations, we had received an email saying that Professor Grazia Stagni had open positions in her lab, and I had immediately responded to schedule an interview. Professor Stagni was one of the labs that focused on Pharmacokinetics and specifically topical/transdermal drug delivery. I was so in for this position, and I had done everything I could to prepare for the interview. After my interview, Dr. Stagni offered me a position in the lab, and I began to read as much as possible. Everything from her former students’ thesis to papers that she authored regarding dermal microdialysis. Of course, I did not know that these tiny probes would help me get to where I am today. She had just received a U.S. FDA grant entitled “Benchmark of dermis microdialysis to assess bioequivalence of dermatological topical products.” I was determined to help out as much as possible to learn this technique and provide any help that the current postdoc (Dr. Joshi) needed. Little did I know I was going to be drinking from a firehose and learning as much as I could as I went along as Dr. Joshi had moved on from his postdoc to PPD. This project was all mine – my baby, and I would make sure I did everything I could to ensure success for this project. When I was not working on course work (fairly extensive at LIU, which helped me immensely), I was conducting experiments and mostly failing. The most important part was that I was learning something new each time that I conducted an experiment. 

We had done enough in vitro microdialysis characterization and method development to quantify metronidazole in the dermis. We had designed experiments in both rabbits and mini-pigs to assess bioavailability (BA) and bioequivalence (BE) of metronidazole using dermal microdialysis. A colleague of mine (Sharareh Senemar) had handled the BE studies in rabbits while I had led the mini-pig studies. In the rabbit studies, we had investigated the ability of dermal microdialysis (dMD) and our study design to reduce the amount of variability to assess dermal BE properly. In the mini-pig studies, we had investigated the ability of dMD to be sensitive, selective, reproducible, and to differentiate between the local BA of two topical drug products. We followed this up by removing the formulations at specified durations and their effect on the dermal exposure. I have linked the above projects to posters that we had presented at several conferences, but I won’t give away too much detail as we have submitted these works to journals for publication. Hopefully, I will be able to share those soon. While I was finishing up my Ph.D. work, the wonderful FDA OGD team had told me about a position in Boston that was looking for a postdoc, which involved BA/BE testing for topical drug products and model development for this technique called coherent Raman scattering imaging. I had heard of this technique, and I thought it was infinity cool, and I could not stop reading about it. I had this feeling a few times before and knew this is what I wanted to do/learn. It was also exciting that it was at Mass General/Harvard Medical School – the best of the very best. I had presented for Conor Evans and his team, virtually (pre-Covid), and I was uneasy about how the presentation went. I loved my interactions with the team, but I beat myself up after a few missed points from the initial presentation. Conor had called me up a few weeks later to offer me the position, and my answer was yes, absolutely!

What do I love about my research now?

There is so much collaboration in the Evans lab, and the amount of work that can be done is infinitely greater than what I could do alone. Despite the fact that I had joined the team during COVID, I have not stopped learning. I collaborate on a multitude of projects using coherent Raman scattering imaging that investigate cutaneous pharmacokinetics after topical drug product application. Currently, I don’t have any publications in the lab but check out the link above to see all the amazing and cool projects others are working on in the lab! 

While my official manuscripts are stuck in the printer, I hope to show you all about topical pharmacokinetics and specific challenges in the world of topical drug delivery. I also hope to explain PK to the level that even non-experts can understand this science and how integral it is to the drug development process.

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