Anyone who left the 2013 AAPS Annual Meeting after the first couple of days missed most of the highlights for OINDP specialists. The meeting, which took place November 10-14 in San Antonio, TX, saved most of the inhalation and nasal drug delivery events for the final two days.
During the Monday-Wednesday exhibition, the majority of the exhibitors with products or services relevant to OINDP developers and manufacturers were emphasizing existing offerings, introducing only a few new products. Several past exhibitors, such as Aptar Pharma and Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, were noticeably absent.
Capsugel DPI capsules on exhibit
Among the companies with new products and services were Intertek, which announced its new comprehensive OINDP services during the meeting; S-Matrix, which was introducing product development software; and UrsaTec, a first-time AAPS exhibitor showing its preservative-free nasal spray pumps.
The first few days of the meeting also featured only a few inhaled drug delivery presentations and posters and even fewer related to nasal delivery, with most of the relevant posters appearing during the final morning session. Over the course of the poster exhibition, approximately 70 posters related to OINDPs were presented, covering a wide range of topics ranging from formulation and analytical techniques to capsule and device performance. More than 40 of those posters appeared during the final poster session on Thursday morning.
Karine Fabio of MannKind with her poster on an inhaled dry powder oxytocin for the treatment of postpartum hemorrhage
A surprisingly small percentage of the posters related to formulation during the meeting dealt with treatments for asthma or COPD. In addition to posters describing inhaled or nasal vaccines and antibiotics for the treatment of lung infections in CF patients, a number of posters described research on inhaled or nasal drugs for a variety of other conditions, including pulmonary arterial hypertension, cancer, behavior disorders, pain, tuberculosis, Parkinson’s disease, and postpartum hemorrhage.
Just a few OINDP-related presentations and no OINDP-specific sessions took place during the first two days of the meeting. In a mini-symposium titled “Better Left Alone? Non-oral FDCs,” held on the morning of November 12, Brent Donovan of Merck discussed inhalation combination products. Later that afternoon, Yoen-Ju Son, also of Merck, discussed “Factors Influencing Screening of Drug Molecules for Inhalation Therapy” during a roundtable titled “Biopharmaceutical Considerations in Selecting Non-Oral Drug Candidates.”
The final two days of the program included the only events that drew significant numbers of OINDP specialists. On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 13, approximately 60 people attended the AAPS Inhalation and Nasal Technology Focus Group (INTFG) business meeting.
On the next page: the INTFG meeting, regulatory symposium, photo gallery
