For Dr. Harry Kochat, the best parts of working in pharmaceutical development are the interactions with grateful patients. Like the one he remembers from early in his career, when Kochat – whose work has focused on the development of life-saving drugs for more than three decades – encountered a mother and her young son.
That drug went on to be used at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to treat brain tumors. The first batch of that drug was produced in one of the pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities in Memphis on the campus of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.
That’s where the tug of fate has now nudged Kochat himself. He’s the new director of the Plough Center for Sterile Drug Delivery Systems at UTHSC, recruited by Dr. Ken Brown – UTHSC’s executive vice chancellor and chief operations officer – to direct the Plough Center’s two manufacturing facilities.