Episode 4 – Psychostimulant research and tips for success in Human Physiology with Dr. Brooks Pond

On this “Pondcast,” Dan and Michele interview Dr. Brooks Pond, Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at ETSU Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy and recipient of ETSU’s Distinguished Faculty Award. Dr. Pond talks with us about her fascinating research into the effects of psychostimulant use on the brain, as well as tips for being successful in her Human Physiology course. Transcript: Dan Vanzant Welcome to White Coat Radio podcast from East Tennessee State University Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy in Johnson City, Tennessee. Each episode we cover a wide range of topics about the pharmacy school experience, from study tips and deep dives with faculty and student premises. We are your hosts, Dan Vanzant. Michele Williams And I'm Doctor Michele Williams, the Gatton academic success specialist. In this episode, we'll be talking with Doctor Brooks Pond, Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy. Doctor Pond teaches human physiology and conducts research into the consequences of psychostimulant use on the brain. She was also the recipient of ETSU’s Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching in 2020. Michele Williams Welcome to White Coat Radio, Doctor Pond. Thank you. I guess we should call this episode the pondcast. And you think so? Michele Williams It works. You're very well known around Gatton as the professor who coordinates human physiology. But your PhD is in pharmacology, particularly neuropharmacology. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. Brooks Pond So I always loved the biological sciences, and I was actually a biochemistry and molecular biology major in college. And while I was in college, I did undergraduate research with a professor, at my undergraduate institution, at Center in Danville, Kentucky. And it was neuro research. And so I loved neuroscience. Knew that I had an interest in teaching, ultimately. Brooks Pond And I applied to programs in cell and molecular biology, that would enable me to essentially rotate through multiple different labs. But give me a good broad base of, teaching expertise. And, I ended up at Duke University in that cell and molecular biology program, and I rotated through all neuro labs. But the lab that I chose to ultimately do my thesis work in was a neuropharmacology lab. Brooks Pond And so my primary, appointment was actually in pharmacology. And so I joined the Department of Pharmacology after my first year, and it was fortuitous because I loved physiology. And to me, pharmacology just really applied physiology. So using their physiological concepts to understand drug action. And so I really enjoyed that, kind of move that it was just serendipitous really. Michele Williams Yeah. And lucky for us too. So, human physiology that that we mentioned, you you coordinate at Gatton is really an essential and foundational course in the pharmacy school curriculum. If a student wants to be successful in your course, what kinds of things would you recommend that they do? Brooks Pond So the biggest thing is that we just cover a lot of content in one semester. And I think that the biggest challenge for students and so the biggest piece of advice I have for success is staying on top of your studies and literally adopting a daily study approach as opposed to studying for exams. And so if you go home every night and spend, you know, at least half the time that you're in class that evening and going over what we did in class, I think by the time it comes test time, it's largely going to be review. Brooks Pond So that's the biggest, piece of advice I have. The other thing is to utilize the worksheet that I provide, as well as the in-class activities that we do to self test. So, you know, you can do those, do the worksheets while we're going through class and enable you to take notes that also utilize those before a test and see if you can fill it in without looking at your notes. Brooks Pond And you can do the same thing with the in class activities that are designed to be group work, where we're looking at models and answering questions based on the model. But ideally, come test time, students should be able to answer the questions without looking at the model and without engaging with others. Michele Williams That that makes so much sense. And I, I love that you do that, that you give students a worksheet that actually helps them prioritize what's important during the lecture. So what they should really tune into, because I think especially students who are new to pharmacy school, it can feel like a lot of information is coming at them at the same time. Michele Williams And so to have that resource to focus your attention and help you to register, oh, she's talking about that thing that's on the worksheet. I think that's terrific. Yeah. So students will see you again later in the curriculum. And what other courses will you be teaching. Brooks Pond So in the second year I teach a little bit in the renal integrated series. And then I also teach a well, an elective course called Non medicinal Drug Use in the second year. So of course not every student would have that, but some may choose to sign up for that. It's a fun class, and I coordinate that and teach a majority of the content for that class. Brooks Pond And then I teach quite a bit in the third year, in particular in the third year fall. So I teach in the neuro psych and then also in the endocrine, men's and women's health. That's, recently two classes that merged. Michele Williams That's great. And and it helps it helps to sort of remind students that the things they're learning in their P1 year, they'll, they'll be hearing about again and they'll be seeing you again. And, there's that continuity throughout the curriculum. I think that's great. Brooks Pond Yes. In fact, a lot of times I'll use like the exact slides from physiology and my repeats and pharmacology, like remember this. And then we're going to talk about the drugs. Michele Williams Yeah. So that's terrific. Dan Vanzant Are there any apps or programs that you recommend students using or that you use in the class that that maybe they wouldn't experience in other classes or that they would find useful? Brooks Pond Yes. So our book, comes with McGraw Hill Connect, and that is an awesome resource. There's an e-book that you can walk through. There's also exercises with practice questions. There's interactive, figures that you can walk through, and it provides you immediate feedback. So if you mess something up, it'll tell you and explain why that's the wrong answer. Brooks Pond And you know why the correct answer is correct. And so that's a great resource. So I encourage students to utilize that. I've already assigned, a Gen Cam and Gen bio kind of review, to all students because some students struggled on certain concepts on the pre-assessment that we did on the second day of getting ready. And so hopefully students are already looking at that, some that they have it for all the chapters. Dan Vanzant So yeah. Okay. And is that the McGraw Hill content. Is that all available through tool or can they go directly to McGraw Hill. Brooks Pond And so you. Michele Williams Can. Brooks Pond You set up a connect and then just bookmark it. But there's a link to connect through our D2L site. Michele Williams So it's easy to get to. Yes. That's great. Dan Vanzant That's great. Yeah. So you've done research looking at the long term effects of psychostimulants like Ritalin. Can you tell us more about that? Brooks Pond Yes. I love talking about this. So, so yes, I have, been at Gatton for 15 years and have been working on a project involving Ritalin for a majority of my time here. So when I was a postdoc, I worked with a guy who was traditionally a Parkinson's researcher, and he became interested. And the link between that long term, spike of stimulant use and, neurodegenerative disease and particular Parkinson's disease. Brooks Pond And the reason that there may be a link at all is because with, psychostimulants, they all increase their levels of dopamine in the brain. And never mean does a lot of good things is a feel good chemical in the brain. But it can be oxidized to, quinone and actually lead to oxidative stress and neurotoxicity. Brooks Pond So caused brain cells to die. And, so the thought was that, okay, if we're providing a long term like stimulant that's consistently elevating our dopamine levels, we may be providing this kind of long term oxidative stress that may sensitize those brain cells, to becoming vulnerable, to other insults. And so in his lab, he used a MPC, TP model. Brooks Pond So MTB as a really super long chemical name one methyl for fennel, 1236 tetra Hydra pyridine. That thankfully we can. Dan Vanzant See it's at now. Michele Williams Brooks Pond So, but it has a really interesting, sad, but interesting history. It was discovered first actually in humans. So back in the early 80s, there were seven cases of, essentially people developing Parkinson's overnight when they injected themselves with what they thought was going to be like a parodying. So they were trying to, synthesize a synthetic opioid like my parodying, and they sped the reaction and ended up with like 95% in PTB, and they injected themselves with it and killed the same neurons that we see die in Parkinson's disease and had the same symptoms, like severe motor symptoms, like, you know, they were called the frozen addicts. Brooks Pond And so basically we've used that tragedy. Now we have an animal model that uses that same chemical. And, we use that as a Parkinson's model. And so he used that and essentially he found that there were several different strains of mice had different vulnerability to that toxin. So certain strains exhibited a significant loss of brain cells in the area of the brain that's affected by Parkinson's disease, which is called the substantia nigra. Brooks Pond And then certain mice strange did not show a loss. And so basically, what, when I worked with him, I found that you could take a psycho stimulant, provide the mouse with a psycho stimulant long term, and it would cause the not vulnerable mouse to become vulnerable. So where once they didn't have a cell loss, they would lose cells. Brooks Pond And so since then, we've collaborated with him some. But we've also done some independent work in terms of trying to figure out why. And is basically, I think what we thought, which is that you're elevating dopamine. We measured that. We saw increased dopamine quinones, with our psycho stimulant exposure. And, there's a natural and eye oxidant that we have in our bodies, and it's in our brain called glutathione. Brooks Pond And that can be kind of added to the quinone or conjugated to the quinone to try to protect cells from that, damaging molecule. But you can deplete it. And so we have found that the long term psycho stimulant use depletes glutathione. And so we basically increase this oxidative stress there. And we deplete the thing that's going to protect against it. Brooks Pond And so ultimately it causes this vulnerability. Well and so yeah, so we have done, done some work with that. So it's been cool stuff. Michele Williams And it seems like really important research given that Ritalin isn't very common. Brooks Pond Yes it is. You know, they they estimate like 8 to 10% of school age children, are treated with some kind of psycho stimulant for ADHD. And in fact, like in adolescence, methylphenidate is the number one prescribed drug in adolescents. Yeah. Michele Williams So it's a lot of food for thought. Yeah, yeah. So. Dan Vanzant So you also study this, pharmacokinetics of vape substances, like, nicotine. What have you found so far with that research? Brooks Pond So. Yes. So we've been collaborating with a researcher from the University of Wisconsin, and he has, little rodent vaping chambers. So essentially the mouse, gets put in this chamber and it's like the whole cage goes in there and it, causes, you know, nicotine vapor in the environment. And it's a very controlled manner. So it's a way of like delivering the drug in the way that humans would take the drug, in a very controlled manner. Brooks Pond And he really wanted to measure the nicotine content in the brain and plasma of these rodents exposed to nicotine vapor. Well, a lot of the methods by which you, measure nicotine are kind of more geared towards measuring nicotine in the vape itself, like, in the fluid. And so you have to have quite a bit higher concentration for those methods to detect the nicotine. Brooks Pond And so if we're going to detect it in a biological matrix like, plasma or our brain, and we need to get down to the nanogram per mil range, they're pretty low concentration. And so we developed methods that we could do that using our LC‑MS machine over in building 178. And we have developed that and we did we're able to detect our nicotine and, rodents exposed to the nicotine vapor, but we haven't actually conducted any studies yet. Michele Williams Which is interesting. What is LC‑MS? Dan. Sorry. Brooks Pond Liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry. Michele Williams Okay. Brooks Pond Yes. Yes. Michele Williams So, I. Brooks Pond I it's a little bit hard to say. Michele Williams Yeah. It's just they use that too in those crime shows like. Brooks Pond Yes. That's right, that's right. Dan Vanzant I understand that pharmacy students can assist with your very interesting research you've been telling us about. What can students expect from that experience? Brooks Pond Yes. So I love working with students in the lab. It's a lot of fun to kind of get to know them outside of the classroom. For one, and all of the students that have been through the lab have multiple opportunities to present their research, either locally at the Appalachian Student Research Forum that's held at ETSU each year, as well as national or even international meetings, depending on their interest. Brooks Pond So I've had a lot of students, present at pharmacy related meetings, like the mid-year meeting is a big one that a lot of students will present, particular when they're thinking residency and want to kind of, mingle, with preceptors in that environment. And then also, I've had students who actually accompany me on my meeting, which I'm a member of a pharmacology society. Brooks Pond And we, our annual meeting. Sometimes I've gone and presented at that meeting as well. And then I've had, you know, pretty much most people that go through the lab get a publication by the time they graduate, if they do their research concentration in the lab. And in fact, have had a couple students, had two publications by the time they've graduated. Michele Williams So that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Great opportunity. Brooks Pond Yeah. So. Michele Williams Well, Doctor Pond, thank you so much for for participating in our podcast today. And, and I look forward to, to learning more about your research and, and I'm sure students are, going to have a lot of great opportunities working with you. So thank you so much for talking to us today. Yeah. Sure thing. Dan Vanzant All right. Thank you.