After studying Pharmacy with specialization in Organic Chemistry, Dr. Rollema became a staff member of the department of Medicinal Chemistry of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, teaching classes and practical courses in Pharmaceutical Organic Chemistry, CNS Drugs and Anti-infective Drugs. His main research interest was initially the medicinal chemistry and mode of action of dopamine antagonists, the neuroleptic phenothiazines (Ph.D. thesis in 1976), but he focused later on the design and development of dopamine agonists (aminotetralin derivaties, such as NO-437) as anti-Parkinson agents, working with the late Dr. Alan S. Horn, head of his department.
Shortly after his colleague, Dr. Ben Westerink, introduced microdialysis in his lab in the early 1980’s (after a visit to Dr. Ungerstedt’s lab in Stockholm), they characterized the neurogenic origin of the collected transmitters and published a review on scope and limitations in 1987. Initially utilizing this method for examining the effects of dopamine agonists on transmitters and metabolites in the extracellular space in rat brain, he later applied the technique for studying the effects of MPP+, the active metabolite of the neurotoxin MPTP on the dopaminergic system in rats. To work with one of the experts in the MPTP field in the USA, he spent a sabbatical year as a visiting professor with Dr. Neal Castagnoli at UCSF (1987-1988) and measured the neurotoxic effects of several MPP+ analogs in rats by locally perfusing the pyridinium compounds and measuring the irreversibility of the effects on dopamine via microdialysis. During his year in San Francisco he mentored PhD students and post-docs the microdialysis technique and collaborated with the UCSF Anatomy Department (Dr. Allan I. Basbaum) on pain and serotonin release.
Dr. Rollema's positive experience during frequent stays in the USA and contacts with several scientists from academia and industry made me decide to accept an offer in 1991 by Pfizer Central Research in Groton, CT, to set up and run a microdialysis lab in the dept. of Neuroscience. He started working at Pfizer in 1992, for the last 5 years as a Research Fellow. His main responsibility is to support the various project teams and candidate drugs in development with in vivo data. The results of several studies that his lab conducted for antidepressant, anti-anxiety, antipsychotic and anti-addiction programs were published. An example of the latter are the papers he wrote on varenicline, the smoking cessation agent now marketed as Chantix. From the beginning he was part of the team that discovered and developed varenicline and act now as the preclinical expert and help to respond to queries form regulatory agencies, to set up and coordinate further pharmacological studies and as the contact for outside investigators.
Occasionally his lab generated data for projects from other Pfizer zones or sites and have studied e.g the serotonergic effects and brain penetration of the anti-migraine triptans. More recently, he developed an interest in the underlying mechanisms of antipsychotic-induced hyperglycemia and initiated collaborations with our Diabetes and General Pharmacology groups and outside experts, resulting in several publications and presentations. Currently his lab continues to support various CNS discovery projects, while he still spends a substantial amount of time on varenicline.
