For the next generation of healthcare workers, the starting line is earlier than ever, thanks to the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Pharmacy. There, future students are getting early exposure to pharmacy during their high school and undergraduate years.

This past summer, a cohort of students working under Drinnan Sante, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Pharmacy, experienced hands-on learning every week in a new internship program at the school designed to expose young learners to the profession years before having to make any career decisions.

Sante is researching the way medications are delivered to the body. More specifically, how to target treatment to only the affected areas of the brain or body that need a drug. His goal is to work towards a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, which affects 6.9 million people in the United States alone.

Sante assembled a team of high school and undergraduate interns who assisted him about 20 hours per week. The goal of the program was to give the students experience in a lab, which will give them a leg up in their studies.

UMKC School of Pharmacy Dean Russell Melchert, Pharm.D., knows that early introduction to the discipline helps show potential students the versatile career paths in pharmacy.

“We like to welcome all who are interested in learning more about pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences,” Melchert said. “Whether they end up wanting to go into one of the many different areas of pharmacy practice or into research, we are trying to get students some hands-on experience and a greater understanding of the many rewarding career pathways our graduates take.”

“This part of the medical field isn’t super obvious when you’re younger,” Sante said. “You think either doctor or dentist, but there’s a whole field where you can do research and actually try to help cure diseases that aren’t cured yet, and this project is a little window into that.”

For recent Blue Valley West High School graduate Cooper Canfield, the opportunity to participate in this research and assist Sante came after conversations with Steve Stoner, Pharm.D., the school’s associate dean for student affairs, when he spoke to the high school’s pre-med club.

“He was talking about some neuroscience research that was happening in the lab over here and I spoke to him afterwards and said, ‘That sounds interesting. Is there any way I can get in a lab and get into all this?’ and he said, ‘Absolutely,’” Canfield said.

Canfield enrolled at the University of Kansas this fall as a chemistry major and neuropsychology minor, and is considering a career in pharmacy down the line.

“It’s the perfect combination of neuroscience and chemistry,” he said.

St. Pius High School senior Meet Kaur was interested in pharmacy from an early age, and  her summer spent doing hands-on work at UMKC was a step up from her earlier shadowing experiences. 

“I’ll go volunteer at hospitals here and there, but it’s not the same as being in a lab and getting the experience,” Kaur said. “I’m learning before college even starts.”

Anay Chatterjee, a sophomore at Olathe North, was the youngest of the group, earning pharmacy lab experience years before other students do. A large part of his internship was honing lab safety skills that he can bring back to his classroom at Olathe North.

“I worked in a biosafety cabinet, where you work with sterile objects,” Chatterjee said. “The safety procedures that I’m running here are really important, because we also have biosafety cabinets back in my high school.”

Chatterjee is working to fill gaps in his resume to make him a competitive college applicant and someday, be accepted into medical school.

The older the student, the more involved the role they play in assisting Sante’s research. For Jacob Suchman, a sophomore studying biology at Davidson College in North Carolina, the summer was a chance to keep his skills sharp.

Suchman worked with a nanopore, a tool commonly used in labs to determine DNA and RNA sequences.

“There’s all sorts of tools that I’ve learned how to use,” Suchman said. “I’m helping Ph.D. students, like Drinnan and some of his colleagues, as they learn and understand nanopore like I am, and figure out how to use it best for their Ph.D. dissertations and other work.”

“It’s given me a great insight on Drinnan’s day-to-day life as a Ph.D. student and the challenges he has to work with,” Suchman said. “I would like to do something similar to what he’s doing.”

Program director, Gerald Wyckoff, Pharm.D., has seen the benefit of the summer program for budding pharmacists.

“It was fantastic to have students in our labs this summer and we enjoyed seeing them make connections in the lab to what they may have seen in their studies,” he said. “Our graduate students were truly an excellent asset in ensuring the success of these summer experiences.”

Interested in getting hands-on experience at the School of Pharmacy next summer? Reach out to Gerald Wyckoff at wyckoffg@umkc.edu.