Dr. James C. Bigelow
Associate Professor
Department of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Science
Idaho State University, Pocatello, Idaho, USA
Dr. Bigelow is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Idaho State University College of Pharmacy. He earned his B.S. degree in Microbiology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Indiana University at Bloomington. He completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Separation Science at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Prior to joining the faculty of the College of Pharmacy he was Director of the HPLC/LC-MS Shared Resource at the Vermont Cancer Center and a faculty member at the University of Vermont in Burlington. He has also worked at the National Institutes in of Health in Rockville Maryland.
Dr. Bigelow teaches in a number of courses in the professional pharmacy curriculum including Physicochemical Basis of Drug Action, Basic Pharmaceutics and Calculations and Pharmacotherapy and also teaches Introduction to Methods in Pharmaceutical Sciences in the Minor in Pharmaceutical Sciences. At the graduate level, Dr. Bigelow teaches Principals of Biopharmaceutical Analysis and contributes to several other graduate courses including Research Foundations and Biological Actions of Chemicals. Dr. Bigelow is also Director of the ISU Bioanalysis Facility.
Research conducted in Dr. Bigelow's group is focused on drug discovery and development using state-of-the-art methods in bioanalytical chemistry and separation science. These activities include the study of metabolism of endogenous neurosteroids, drug-drug metabolic interactions, pharmacokinetics, and natural product drug discovery.
Natural products are discrete chemical agents produced by an organism for ecological reasons such as defense, communication, etc. They include many important therapeutic agents such as penicillin, cyclosporine A, and amphotericin B. Discovery of new natural product drugs is critically dependent on the preservation and examination of global biodiversity. The most common source of natural product, common soil microbes, has been thoroughly examined. Few new natural products are now derived from these organisms. Working in collaboration with Dr. John Eley, a variety of plant materials from Peru are being examined for new natural products.