Masahiro Sakagami
Professor of Pharmaceutics at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Pharmacy
Dr. Masahiro Sakagami is a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutics at the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) School of Pharmacy in Richmond, Virginia, USA. He received B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering at Waseda University in Japan (1989 and 1991, respectively); and a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences at VCU (2000). In 1991-1996, he was an inhalation drug delivery scientist at Teijin Ltd., a pharmaceutical industry in Japan.
Dr. Sakagami has extensive experience and expertise of academic and industrial research in the areas of biopharmaceutics and pharmacology for drugs via pulmonary delivery, alongside regulatory assessments of inhaled products. He has published ~50 original researches, authored several book chapters, and made over 40 invited presentations at scientific conferences, industry and academia, all in these areas of his expertise. His recent research is focused on novel inhaled drug discovery in emphysema, COPD and pulmonary fibrosis; and dissolution testing for inhaled products. In 2006-2010, he served an ad hoc Advisory Panel for the USP Performance Tests of Inhalation Dosage Forms. In 2013-2017, he was one of the grant award recipients to develop in vivo-predictive in vitro drug aerosol dissolution testing by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
At VCU, Dr. Sakagami is actively engaged in advising graduate students in research, serving as Pharmaceutics Graduate Program Director, and teaching in the School of Pharmacy PharmD and graduate curriculum.
