Welcoming over 600 attendees to the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, conference chair Gary Pitcairn opened the meeting on December 9, 2015 by noting the 20% increase in attendance from DDL 25 and suggesting that next year’s meeting might attract even more delegates, especially since the organizing committee has decided to halve the registration cost for students. The student rate for DDL 27 will be only £85, he announced.
The increasing attendance and added incentive for young researchers are in line with the conference’s slogan, “Shaping the next 25 years of nasal and pulmonary drug delivery,” though this year’s meeting virtually ignored nasal drug delivery. And the DDL 26 program offered the 610 delegates a look at emerging trends in OINDP development, particularly in the areas of biologics, patient-focused development, and novel analytical methods.
The first session of the meeting opened with two presentations on biologics, one on formulation of biologics for OINDPs by Mark Parry of Intertek Melbourn and the other on analytical methodologies for dry powder biologics by Karen Western of Vectura. Both discussed the challenges presented by large molecules that may be subject to degradation and aggregation during analysis and delivery, and which require orthogonal testing strategies.
In the afternoon, one presentation in particular illustrated the accelerating timeline of biologics development. On the final day of DDL 25, Bernhard Fischer of APEPTICO had described development of his company’s of its AP301 inhalation solution for the treatment of pulmonary edema and had the audience that his company hoped one day to develop a dry powder formulation of the peptide for the treatment of altitude sickness. One year later, Isabel Lopes of Hovione took to the podium to outline the development of an API-only AP301 DPI which has been demonstrated to be stable over a three-month period and capable of delivering sufficiently large doses of powder for the rescue treatment of altitude sickness.
DDL continued its tradition of quirky “What on the Earth” presentations with a talk on the use of parasitic worm products for the suppression of airway allergic reactions presented by Henry McSorley of the University of Edinburgh. McSorley described his work identifying proteins excreted by helminth parasites that suppress IL-33 release in mouse models and that might be synthesized for the treatment of asthma in humans.
