SPIRITUS: (JAN-14) A Monthly update from the Respiratory Technology team at the WIMR.

This is our January 2014 update of news from the Respitech group at the WIMR.

The RespiTech Group celebrates a year of operation this month and look forward to an exciting year ahead. In January the group has been ramping up operations for 2014 and celebrating a number of new initiatives and successes.

Firstly, Wing-Hin Lee was awarded the Woolcock Institute’s inaugural Early Career Researcher Grant. Wing will use the $10,000 grant to establish his project proposal in the area of lung cancer targeting. The group also congratulates Mehra Haghi for receiving a Travel Grant from the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand. Mehra will use the award travel to South Australia in April to attend the annual meeting and present her work.

As usual we would like to welcome new members to our group. Jasper Lamers and Mary Goud have joined us from the Netherlands as visiting researchers. Jasper will be working on projects within the field of patient compliance and ‘good inhaler device use’, while Mary will be working on advanced phosphodiesterase inhibitor therapies. We would also like to welcome Khanh Huynh to the group. Khanh is an Honours student from Engineering and will spend the next year with the group studying and optimising fluid flow paths through dry powder inhaler devices using in vitro and in silica models.

The group celebrated Chinese New Year this month, with members bringing a number of dishes to enjoy, including sushi, cupcakes and beef tendon jelly. The event was also accompanied by the celebration of John Chan’s successful PhD thesis submission. We also announced the successful completion and launch of the Woolcock Video, of which a number of the group were involved in making a success. You can find the Woolcock Video, Chinese New Year and other group social activities on our Facebook Page (www.Facebook.com/RespiTech).

Lastly, we would like to congratulate YY for publishing a first author paper in AAPS Journal entitled ‘Combined Inhaled Salbutamol and Mannitol Therapy for Mucus hyper-secretion in Pulmonary Diseases’. This study utilises a number of cell-based models and in vitro techniques to study the effect of combined β-2 agonist and mannitol formulations on cilia beat frequency, muscle contraction and drug absorption.