In a lecture presented by the winner of the DDL Emerging Scientist Award for 2018, Josué Sznitman of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology stated, “We kind of suck at targeting specific areas of the lung” and discussed the difficulty of creating an integrated model for the whole lung due to the scale differences throughout the organ. He described various methods of modeling flow in different areas of the lung, including the acini-on-chip technology he presented at RDD 2017, as well as a method of targeting drug to highly specific locations in the lung using magnetic particles.
Kimberly Witzmann of the FDA presented a talk titled, “Critical importance of excipients in generic product development – now and the future,” in which she detailed FDA-funded research programs in general and three specific studies to evaluate the effects of excipients that have been carried out by researchers at Cirrus, the University of Florida, and the University of Bath.
One of those studies was presented during the Pat Burnell New Investigator Award competition by finalist Stefanie Drescher of the University of Florida, whose poster was titled, “Assessing Central and Peripheral Pulmonary Deposition of Three Fluticasone Propionate (FP) Dry Powder Inhaler (DPI) Formulations with Different Aerodynamic Particle Size Distributions (APSD) in Healthy Subjects via Population Pharmacokinetics Modeling”
The remaining finalists for the Pat Burnell Young Scientist Competition were:
- Larissa Gomes dos Reis, University of Sydney, “Gene delivery to lung epithelial cells using a cell penetrating peptide”
- Irene Rossi, University of Parma, “In vitro activity of inhalable microparticles containing anti-TB drugs and an efflux pump inhibitor against Mycobacteria infections”
- Sanketkumar Pandya, Central Drug Research Institute, “Dry Powder Inhalation of Glucagon-like peptide-1 for management of type-2 Diabetes Mellitus”
