SPIRITUS: (6-14) A Monthly update from the Respiratory Technology team at the WIMR.

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

This month, members of the group travelled to Germany to establish a new partnership with Evonik Industries. Daniela and Paul spent time at Evonik's site near Darmstadt for an Evonik-Woolcock strategic workshop that focussed on future directions that will result in expansion of technology and research in a number of exciting new areas. 

At the same time, the Australian Research Council announced the successful participants in the 2014 linkage grant scheme. The Respiratory Technology group were awarded a three years grant worth $482,738 for the development of inhaled vaccines. This project was one of the first initiatives developed via preliminary talks with Evonik at the end of 2013. Dr Windhab (Evonik) is the linkage partner along with CIs Young and Traini. The grant was entitled 'One for all and all for one- Engineering a drug delivery platform for DNA vaccines to the lung’
 
Earlier in the month Paul was interviewed by John Scott on 4BC radio's Health and Wellbeing Show discussing the issues with common lung diseases including asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and tuberculosis and how we can develop new approaches to targeting such diseases. This interview coincided with the launch of a new video and partnership focussing on TB with Pharmaxis Ltd.

Two papers were published this month by the group. The first was entitled 'On the thermal and evolved gas analysis of salbutamol sulphate' in the Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry. This paper is the first output resulting from a collaboration between Dr Fabio Sonvico at University of Technology Sydney and the RespiTech group at the Woolcock. The second paper was a review entitled 'An overview of biosimilars' published in the Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales. John Chan was the first author of the article.

As usual we would like to welcome new members and say good by to old colleagues. This Month we say farewell to John Chan who has taken up a position as a Formulation Scientist & Project Manager at JHL Biotech in Taiwan. We wish John all the best and also congratulate him for his successful award of his PhD from the University of Sydney this month. Well done Dr Chan!