Nearly 500 people attended the first day of the 2011 Drug Delivery to the Lungs meeting (DDL 22) at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. Approximately 50 of the DDL 22 attendees were also registered for the ISAM workshop on lung imaging standardization which took place in the morning prior to the opening of the main conference.
The meeting opened with an announcement by DDL Chair Georgina Fradley of a new research grant scheme sponsored by the Aerosol Society to support aerosol research. A total of £17,500 will be available for activities such as the purchase of new equipment or services, travel, software, and consumables necessary for research. Applicants must be members of the Aerosol Society and work in either academia or businesses classified as “small and medium enterprises” in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Isle of Man, or the Channel Islands. Applications for the 2012 round are due by January 31, 2012.
Following that announcement, Fradley introduced Professor Peter Barnes of Imperial College London to deliver the inaugural DDL Lecture, titled “New Drugs and Targets for COPD.” Professor Barnes’s talk detailed the need for new drugs for COPD which, unlike asthma, does not respond to corticosteroids. As a result, long acting bronchodilators represent the “mainstay of our current drug management of COPD,” he said; and while LABA/LAMA combinations are “the most exciting development” in that type of therapy, those drugs do nothing to prevent or treat exacerbations, to reduce mortality or co-morbidities, or to prevent the progression of the disease.
Barnes described his group’s efforts to understand and overcome steroid resistance in COPD in order to reduce inflammation instead of attempting to block any one of the variety of mediators involved in the disease. Among the drugs that show potential for overcoming steroid resistance, he cites theophyliine, which works by stimulating histone deacetylase (HDAC) by inhibiting PI3K-δ, even at very low concentrations. Other PI3K-δ are now in development. Barnes noted that Nrf2 is another promising target for COPD and that one drug that can activate it is sulforaphane, a compound found in broccoli.
Whatever new drugs are developed for the treatment of COPD Barnes suggested, “inhaled therapies will predominate” due to problems with side effects from oral medications. New inhaled drugs for the disease should also have much smaller aerodynamic particle sizes than current inhaled medications, he said, with aerosols having an MMAD of approximately 1 μm. In addition, he recommended that early treatment, analogous to that for high blood pressure or high cholesterol, should be considered so that patients would receive treatment for COPD before they experience symptoms in order to minimize damage from the disease.
At the conclusion of Barnes’s lecture, Fradley presented him with a crystal bowl in recognition of his presentation of the first DDL lecture.
