The research community is under increasing pressure to document the impact of its activities. One of the root causes of this pressure is the entirely reasonable desire on the part of the funders of research—and ultimately society at large—to know what benefits they are accruing on their investments. Done judiciously, an ongoing assessment of the impact of research would be a good thing for all ...

The drug candidates coming from combinatorial chemistry research and/or the drugs selected from biologically based high-throughput screening are quite often very lipophilic, as these drug candidates exert their pharmacological action at or in biological membranes or membrane-associated proteins. This challenges drug delivery institutions in industry or academia to develop carrier systems for th...

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Firstly, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Dr. Robert Hanson for not only being my thesis advisor, but also for allowing me to do research in his lab and guiding me through each process. He took me in as an undergraduate student three years ago and provided me with the training and resources I needed to succeed as a chemist. Without his advisement throughout my p...