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2022 Annual Meeting Highlights The Intersectionality of Health Disparities— Pharmacology, Prescribing Bias, and Social Determinants of Health Submitted by Dr. Margaret E. Gnegy, PhD As pharmacologists and educators who are training the next generation of scientists and clinicians, we must acknowledge the bias and social determinants of health that impact the health and wellbeing of our country’s citizens. Jayne S. Reuben, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of Instructional Effectiveness, Texas A&M University College of Dentistry kicked off the Presidential Symposium at the 2022 ASPET Annual Meeting at Experimental Biology. “We are concerned about the constant use of federal funds to support this most notorious expression of segregation. Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death.” In 1966, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke these words at the second convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Chicago, Ill. These words still ring true today in 2022 as so painfully illustrated by the COVID pandemic that highlighted the differences in morbidity and mortality rates in historically minoritized communities. As pharmacologists and educators who are training the next generation of scientists and clinicians, we must acknowledge the bias and social determinants of health that impact the health and wellbeing of our country’s citizens. To bring these issues front and center, three speakers at EB 2022 unpacked concepts from different frameworks.
Speaker L’Aurelle A. Johnson, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Minnesota, College of Pharmacy. Her presentation explored Activating the DEIA Signaling Pathway through Pharmacology. Dr. Johnson spoke about the regulation of signal transduction pathways, which are complex and requires activation and inactivation of molecular pathways to elicit a desired response (i.e. cell proliferation, synaptic plasticity, long-term potentiation). Similarly, activating the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) signal transduction pathway is a complex process, especially in the areas of activating people, education, and research. Effective activation of these signal transduction pathways requires: 1) reception, which is the detection and interaction between the signaling molecule or ligand with the specific receptor, 2) transduction, which is when the binding of the ligand to the receptors which initiates a sequential modification to downstream molecules that result in 3) a response, which is the outcome from a specific signal trigger. Dr. Johnson emphasized that people are important to the pharmacology enterprise and that diversity in people is important to ensure the perpetuity of the
The Pharmacologist • June 2022
