Joseph Balthasar PhD

Dr. Joseph Balthasar is the David and Jane Chu Endowed Chair in Drug Discovery and Development and Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Dr. Balthasar received a B.S. in Pharmacy (1991) and a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutics (1996) from the University at Buffalo. He served as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutics at the University at Buffalo from 1996-1997 and, from 1997-1999, as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Utah. Dr. Balthasar rejoined the University at Buffalo as an Assistant Professor in 1999 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2003 and to Full Professor in 2008. Dr. Balthasar also serves as the Director of the Center for Protein Therapeutics and as UB’s Executive Director for Research Initiatives.

Dr. Balthasar’s research utilizes pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic analyses to guide the development of new immunotherapies. Current research in the Balthasar Lab, which is funded by the National Cancer Institute and the Center for Protein Therapeutics, focuses on the development of new platform strategies to improve the safety and efficacy of antibody-based treatments for cancer. Balthasar’s Payload Binding Selectivity Enhancer (PBSE) platform is under development by Abceutics Inc., a UB start-up company, and the lab’s Anti-Idiotypic Distribution Enhancer (AIDE) platform is being pursued via the Empire Discovery Institute.