12 August 2014 – 85 people comprising IMU students and registered health professionals attended a talk entitled ‘Novel Treatments for Diabetes’ at the Senate Room in International Medical University (IMU)’s campus in Bukit Jalil. The Malaysian Pharmaceutical Society-Young Pharmacist Chapter (MPS-YPC) and IMU Alumni have worked together to organise this event in conjunction with the BPharm 10th Anniversary. The talk was presented by Prof Brian Furman, Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Prof Furman is a Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain and of the British Pharmacological Society. He has published extensively in the scientific literature and has also secured significant research funding from the United Kingdom and internationally. He is on the editorial boards of Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism and the Journal of Ethnopharmacology. Since 2009, Prof Furman has been coming regularly to IMU, where his role is primarily to help in the development of research, including mentoring of young faculty and the fostering of research collaborations between his own university in the UK, which has had a partnership with IMU for the past 18 years for training pharmacy students. A witty speaker himself, Prof Furman injected humour throughout his speech to keep the talk interactive and lively. He introduced the disease and its increasing prevalence worldwide, this being partly due to the increasing prevalence of obesity. Following a brief outline of current therapy, and how this changed in 2005 following the introduction of exenatide and other glucagon-like-peptide-1 (GLP-1) related therapies, he discussed agents currently under development; these included orally active, small molecule insulin-mimetics, glucagon receptor antagonists, as well as novel insulin delivery systems. The last-mentioned included a novel pulmonary delivery system, which will be launched in 2015 to supersede the withdrawn Exubera formulation.
