DDL 23 concluded on Friday, December 7 with a final plenary talk and podium session, the announcement of contest winners, and news about next year’s DDL meeting.
Rob Price of the University of Bath presented the first talk of the day, titled “Evaluating the effects of formulation and device design on in vitro comparability of dry powder inhalers.” in which he described modifications to dry powder inhalers and formulations to try to achieve comparable behavior, noting that the influence of the formulation usually outweighs that of the device.
The day’s session, on the topic of “The inhaled market – where is it going?,” featured five additional papers on a variety of subjects, from David Morton’s description of the collaboration between GSK and Monash University, to David Howlett’s survey of inhaled drugs in emerging markets,to Paul Greenhalgh’s call for more user-centric design of inhalers and demonstration of how design might be varied for three hypothetical patients.
At the close of the session, Gary Pitcairn announced that next year’s meeting will take place one week later than usual in order to avoid a conflict with the British Thoracic Society meeting. DDL 24 will therefore take place December 11-13, 2013. Abstracts will be due in July of that year.
During the final coffee break of the meeting in the exhibition hall, the winners of various contests held at the exhibitor booths were announced. Two of the contests required final activities to determine winners: Novi Systems gathered a crowd to watch its breath simulator fill and then pop a balloon to determine the winner of a contest to guess the pressure required to do so, and Team Consulting held a playoff between the two top scorers of its Space Inhalers game, Freya Freestone of Chiesi and Martin Wing-King of Pharmaterials, with Wing-King coming out on top.
