Prof. Maree Smith

Professor

Tetra Q, Level 3, Steele building (#3), St Lucia
Phone: +61 7-336-52554
Email: m.smith@tetraq.uq.edu.au

Professor Maree Smith joined the School of Pharmacy as a Lecturer in 1989 and was succesively promoted to the positions of Senior Lecturer and then Reader (1998).

She undertook postdoctoral training in the field of opioid pharmacology after having completed her PhD in the fields of clinical pharmacokinetics, analytical chemistry and drug metabolism. Maree Smith teaches primarily in the Drug Discovery stream of the 2nd, 3rd & 4th years of the undergraduate pharmacy program and has been instrumental in developing innovative courses for the final year of the undergraduate Pharmacy curriculum in recent years.

Maree has successfully supervized to completion numerous postgraduate research students including Honours, Masters and PhD. This resulted in her being awarded a "Meritorious Mention" in November 2001 for sustained excellence over a 12-year period in supervision of postgraduate research students.

She is Head of the Pain Research Group in the School of Pharmacy and directs its preclinical pharmacology research program. This group undertakes research in a broad range of projects focussed on improving our understanding of the mechanistic basis of a range of pain states and their pharmacological management, with a view to improving our ability to alleviate chronic pain in patients.

Research Interests

Opioid pharmacology

• Role of morphine-3-glucuronide (M3G) in:
  • Analgesic tolerance to systemically administered morphine
  • Neuro-excitatory side-effects of high-dose systemic morphine & related opioid analgesics
• M3G's mechanism of action
• Pharmacology of oxycodone
• Opioid analgesic synergy & its mechanistic basis
• Modulatory effects of sex steroids on opioid pharmacokinetics and levels of pain relief produced

Neuropathic Pain

• Neuropathic pain mechanisms and their pharmacological management
  • In particular painful diabetic neuropathy

Selected Publications

• Edwards SR, Smith MT.   Simultaneous determination of morphine, oxycodone, morphine-3-glucuronide, and noroxycodone concentrations in rat serum by high performance liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry.  J Chromatogr B Analyt Technol Biomed Life Sci, 814: 241-9, 2005.
• Nielsen CK, Lewis RJ, Alewood D, Drinkwater R, Palant E, Patterson M, Yaksh TL, McCumber D, Smith MT.  Anti-allodynic efficacy of the c-conopeptide, Xen2174, in rats with neuropathic pain.  Pain (accepted with revision), Feb 2005.
• Ladd LA, Kam PC, Williams DB, Wright AWE, Smith MT, Mather LE.  Ventilatory responses of healthy subjects to intravenous combinations of morphine and oxycodone under imposed hypercapnic and hypoxaemic conditions.  Br J Clin Pharmacol, 59: 524-35, 2005.
• Huang L, Edwards SR, Smith MT.  Comparison of the pharmacokinetics of oxycodone and noroxycodone in male Dark Agouti and Sprague-Dawley rats: Influence of streptozotocin diabetes. Pharm Res (in press), 2005.

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