In the awards for more established scientists, the Career Achievement Award for “a senior investigator whose body of work demonstrates a lifetime of outstanding achievement in aerosol science” was presented to Warren Finlay of the University of Alberta. Rui Carlos Sá of the University of California San Diego won the Willi Stahlhofen Award for “a scientist or team of scientists which have published their outstanding experimental research in the Journal of Aerosol Medicine and Pulmonary Drug Delivery.”
Gerhard Scheuch, founder of Activaero, Inamed, and Ventaleon, was named the winner of the Juraj Ferin Award for outstanding contributions to ISAM. Scheuch presented a poster at the meeting on Ventaleon’s recent study of inhaled LASAG for the treatment of severe influenza.
The Thomas T. Mercer Award, which is sponsored by ISAM and AAAR, and “is based on the achievement of excellence in the field of medicinal aerosols and inhalable materials,” was presented to Tony Hickey of RTI International, who gave a short talk tracing his career in research from his graduate student work through the present and crediting all of his mentors over the years. One of the mentors cited by Hickey, Donovan Yeates of KAER Biotherapeutics, was at the meeting, presenting a poster on his new heliox-based aerosol delivery system.
Presentations
Another longtime researcher who traced the course of his research was Warren Zapol of Massachusetts General Hospital who reviewed his work on the development of the use of inhaled nitric oxide for the treatment of “blue babies” through to his invention of a nitric oxide generator which can provide NO at a fraction of the cost of the tank NO marketed in first world countries. Zapol is the scientific advisor to Third Pole, which recently won Johnson & Johnson Innovation’s JLABS @ M2D2 QuickFire Challenge
Zapol’s talk was followed by a presentation by Cecil Charles of Duke University titled “Diagnostic Gases: Imaging and Lung Function Testing” in which he described methods for using imageable gas mixtures such as perfluorinated gas/oxygen to show how regions of the lung fill and empty over time with good spatial and temporal resolution.
