Jolyon Mitchell of Trudell Medical presents data on use of an anatomical face model for MDI evaluation
On the morning of May 22, one of the organizers of RDD Europe 2013, Peter Byron, opened the meeting by welcoming approximately 470 delegates back to Berlin. According to Byron, 87% of the delegates come from the pharmaceutical industry and 10% are academics, plus a small number of regulators. Delegates have arrived from more than 31 countries, with almost 70% from Europe, 20% from North America, and the remainder from a variety of other countries, including Turkey, Iran, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, New Zealand, Uruguay, Brazil, and Russia.
During his opening remarks, Byron also announced two future meetings: RDD China 2013 and RDD Europe 2015, which will be held Nice, France. The location of RDD 2014 — Fajardo, Puerto Rico — had been announced previously. The meeting in China later this year will be co-sponsored by the CFDA and will feature presentations with simultaneous translation. According to co-organizer Joanne Peart, RDD Online expects that approximately 200 delegates will attend the meeting in Beijing; poster guidelines and registration information will be released soon.
Team Consulting was handing out a new booklet on human factors engineering at the exhibition
Following Byon’s welcome, Professor Dirkje Postma of the Department of Pulmonary Medicine and Tuberculosis, University Medical Centre Groningen presented the plenary lecture titled “Small Airway Dysfunction in Asthma and COPD: Consequences for Therapy and the Future.” Prof. Postma presented recent studies that call into question past assumptions that asthma is a disease of the large airways and suggest that inhaled drugs with smaller particle sizes that reach the small airways result in improved control of the disease.
Prof. Postma also noted that in the past decade, new methods of evaluating small airway resistance have provided more accurate means of measuring dysfunction in those airways than FEV1, which mostly reflects large airway flow. She urged continued study to develop diagnostic tools for small airway disease and to determine the value of targeting the lower airways for specific types of asthma and COPD.
