Thomas Voshaar spoke about COPD treatment during lunch
On the first full day of the International Society of Aerosol Medicine (ISAM) 2013 Congress, Congress Chair Bill Bennett welcomed approximately 330 delegates to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Many of the delegates had already attended ISAM events on Saturday, including three pre-Congress workshops and a welcome reception.
More than 50 people attended a workshop covering regulatory issues, and the other two workshops, on the basics of aerosol technology and the inhalation of nanoparticles, drew approximately 30 attendees each.
At the reception on Saturday evening, Bennett presented ISAM’s Career Achievement Award to Günter Oberdörster of the University of Rochester, recognizing his work on the toxicology of inhaled particles. In particular, ISAM notes, he “pioneered in the field of nanotoxicology, raising awareness of the unique biokinetics and toxicological potential of engineered nano-sized particles.”
The Congress opened officially on Sunday morning with a session on “Advances in Biomarkers for Assessing Efficacy of Aerosol Therapies,” and the session’s four presentations kicked off a day packed with a total of seventeen presentations during four sessions, a plenary talk, and the lunch break.
The first of the congress’s two plenary speakers, Richard Boucher, Kenan Professor of Medicine and Director of Cystic Fibrosis Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where the congress is taking place, gave a well-received talk on “Translating the Emerging Knowledge of Mucus Biology and Biophysics into Clinical Benefit.”
A poster described development of this new capsule-based DPI from VCU
In his talk, Boucher reviewed recent research that has disproven the traditional view of a gel-like mucus layer moving on top a liquid periciliary layer. Instead, he showed, both layers are composed of gel, and in healthy lungs, the osmotic pressure of the periciliary layer exceeds that of the mucus layer, resulting in well hydrated mucus that can move easily. In diseased lungs, the mucus layer becomes dehydrated and “steals” water from the periciliary layer, which then collapses, resulting in mucus adhesion.
Boucher then discussed promising possible treatments using either calcium channel blockers or osmolytes to rehydrate mucus, particularly the possibility of overnight delivery of hypertonic saline to the lungs via the transnasal route.
The transnasal route to the lung was the subject of several other talks, in the next session, “Aerosol Therapy in Patients Receiving Noninvasive Positive Pressure Ventilation.” Mike Hindle’s discussion of “Bypassing Upper Airway Aerosol Deposition with Enhanced Condensational Growth,” described the use of transnasal delivery for nebulized solutions introduced into non-invasive ventilator circuits. Tomas Navratil also talked about “Aerosol Delivery Through High Flow Nasal Cannulae.”
Afternoon sessions included “New Devices and Emerging Therapies,” the day’s designated “Hot Topic” session and “Improving Patient Adherence/Compliance for Inhaled Therapies.” The latter session included a report from the 2011 IPAC-RS conference titled “Ensuring Patient Success: Improving Adherence Through Concordance.”
The hot topics session also included papers on two recurrent themes for the first day: defenses against inhaled biothreats and powder nebulizers. Karleigh Hamblin of the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory presented data on the efficacy of inhaled lipsomal ciprofloxacin against Yersinia pestis; In the morning, Chad Roy of Tulane University delivered a talk about studies of vaccines against inhaled ricin.
Kaer Biotherapeutic’s Supraer device
In addition to a talk on “Performance Testing of a Novel Continuous Powder Aerosolizer,” several poster abstracts also described powder nebulization and during the technology exhibition, Donovan Yeates of Kaer Biotherapeutics demonstratied the Supraer continuous dry powder aerosol generator, technology that won the 2012 North Amercian Aerosol Drug Delivery Technology Innovation Award by Frost & Sullivan. According to Yeates, the Supraer can produce respirable powders from large molecule drugs and viscous solutions.
The day concluded with concurrent meetings for the Pediatrics and Cystic Fibrosis and the Regulatory and Standardization Issues networking groups. The networking group meetings featured discussion of posters and socializing over wine and cheese.
