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

This month members of the group attended RDD 2014 in Puerto Rico. The location and science was exceptional and our group presented seven full conference papers (congratulations to Yang, Mehra, YY, Alaa, Eric, Michele and Mariateresa). The 4 page conference abstracts for each are available via the www.rddonline.com publications portal. Paul chaired an interesting session on 'Optimizing Nasal and Pulmonary Formulations' and Yang gave an excellent poster on the podium, discussing the impact of pMDI orifice geometry on electrostatics and aerosol performance.

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Members of the RespiTech Team at RDD 2014

Back home, members of the group celebrated the installation of a new flow-cytometer which was the result of our campaign to 'Solve lung disease one cell at a time'. The installation of this facility was via a substantial financial contribution from a kind donor who supports the Woolcock's mission to be Leaders in Breathing and Sleep Research.

www.ecr2star.org received fresh material on the importance and meaning of research metrics. The website also received minor upgrades and the addition of a new archive page of previous articles. Paul discussed the importance of ecr2star at the University of Sydney's Research Bites and we encourage researchers of all ages to get involved!

As usual, we would like to welcome new members to the team. This month Angelo Granieri, from the University of Ferrara, Italy, joins us. Angelo will spend the next 4 months studying aerosol generation of non-newtonian fluids for targeting the upper respiratory tract. Welcome Angelo! Finally, we would like to congratulate Judy Loo for being first author on a paper in Biofouling (IF: 4;) entitled 'Non-cytotoxic silver nanoparticles-polyvinyl alcohol hydrogels with anti-biofilm activity: Designed as coatings for endotracheal tube materials' Good work!

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

This month the group have been busy hosting guests, traveling interstate to present and participate in a number of events and preparing for the ISAM 2014 conference. Early on in the month, Prof Carsten Ehrhardt (on sabbatical from Trinity college Dublin) gave a presentation to the Institute. Carsten's sabbatical was relatively short as he left us at the end of April, however we now have a number of established collaborations in the area of nasal and pulmonary cell biology which we will continue to work in partnership over the coming years

Early on in the month, a press release regarding formulation development for the Orbital device, by the RespiTech team and Pharmaxis drew attention of local media and resulted in Paul undertaking a number of radio interviews with national broadcasters (you can learn more here).

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RespiTech at TSANZ 2014

Members of the Team traveled to the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand (TSANZ) annual meeting in Adelaide where Mehra, Paul and Dany gave three separate talks. Mehra talked about drug transport and the impact of diet on asthma, Paul gave a presentation on advances in treating ventilator associated pneumonia and Daniela gave a podium on repurposing drugs for treating respiratory diseases. The following week, the team were at the annual Drug Delivery Australia meeting in Melbourne (this year linked with the 5th FIP Pharmaceutical Sciences World Congress), where Dany gave a presentation on treating TB by inhalation and how the Orbital device may be the answer.

Also this month, both Paul and Daniela attended the 30th Rebecca Cooper dinner and awards ceremony in Sydney, where Paul collected a Rebecca Cooper Medical Research Grant for the Woolcock Team (Burgess, Oliver, Young) entitled 'Using electric cell-substrate impedance to explore the regulation of angiogenesis in asthma'

As always we welcome and say goodbye to guests and RespiTech Team members. In addition to Carsten's departure, we also say farewell to Wilco. Wilco has made fantastic progress over the past 9 months on 2 projects. One focused on enhancing uptake of poorly soluble drugs in the lung and on treating pulmonary haemorrhage. Wilco is now current travelling around New Zealand before returning to the Netherlands. You can follow Wilco's adventure as we post them on our Facebook page. We wish you well for your future career and you are always welcome back. We also welcome Sumit Arora. Sumit is a PhD student form India that has been awarded a prestigious Endeavour Scholarship to spend time at the Woolcock for 4 months. His work will focus on inhalable anti-fungals.

Click here to find more RespiTech publications

We would like to congratulate members of the team for recent publications. This month the group have had 4 papers accepted in a number of Journals. Firstly, the group have had a paper accepted in 'Pharm. Res.' with colleagues at Monash University. The paper titled 'Spray characteristics of solution based pressurised metered dose inhalers: effects of formulation and co-flow conditions' uses high-speed schlieren to derive time-resolved velocity, penetration and spreading angle measurements in pMDI spray plumes. The second research paper accepted this month was authored by Alaa Tulbah. The paper accepted in 'AAPS PharmSci Tech' describes 'Novel Simvastatin Inhalation Formulation and Characterisation' for the treatment of hyper-mucosal secretion in bronchiectasis. Additionally, two Review papers were accepted this month. Mehra and YY were corresponding authors on a paper entitled 'Across the pulmonary epithelial barrier: integration of physicochemical properties and human cell models to study pulmonary drug formulations' accepted in 'Pharmacology and Therapeutics, while Wing and Judy were the first two authors on a review entitled 'Recent advances in curcumin nano-formulation for cancer therapy' accepted in 'Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery'. Well done all!

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Lastly, April saw the team announce the opening of registration and abstract submission for the 2014 ISAM-Woolcock Conference to be held in Sydney. You can find out more information at the following link (http://woolcock.org.au/isam2014)

CLICK THE LUNG TO GO TO THE ISAM 2014 WEBPAGE

Click the lung to go to the ISAM 2014 Webpage

The International Society for Aerosols in Medicine and the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research are proud to announce that both online registration and abstract submission for the 2014 Conference and Workshop are now open.

You can submit an abstract and/or register online now at www.woolcock.org.au/isam2014
Just follow the abstract and registration tabs! Note, early Bird registrations are open until 24th August 2014.

The conference will be held at the WIMR Headquarters on 25-26 Sept 2014 in Sydney, Australia.

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The Topics for this year focus on paediatric respiratory medicine and bioequivalence of Inhaled formulations. Highlights include:

• Emerging therapies for paediatric diseases.
• The impact of your formulation on PK
• Regulatory hurdles for paediatric therapy
• In vitro in vivo correlation challenges and formulation prediction
• Current practice and state-of-the-art for treating lung disease in children
• Methodological approaches for IVIVC

• Podium presentations
• Posters sessions
• Hands on workshop
• Roundtable discussions
• Conference dinner
• Social events and networking

Early bird prices are AUD $225, $325 and $435 for students, academics and industry attendees, respectively. If you are interested in being a sponsor please contact us at isam2014@woolcock.org.au

We look forward to seeing you in September

The ISAM-Woolcock Team

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

This month, the RespiTech team have been busy developing the upcoming joint ISAM-Woolock conference in September and were pleased to announce the Keynote speakers. The program is starting to come together with a number of invited speakers and the first call for abstracts is planned for the 1st week in April. 

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Eric & Michele using the new JEOL desktop SEM

In the laboratory, the team have overseen the installation of a new scanning electron microscope. The bench-top SEM will significantly enhance the groups productivity as we can immediately screen particulate systems after production, allowing us to optimise engineering processes via informed decisions. Meanwhile, the group published a paper in Drug Development and Industrial Pharmacy focussed on aersosolisation of high-dose cohesive powders intended for the treatment of bronchiectasis. This is the second paper with Pharmaxis Ltd investigating the Orbital multi-breath inhaler.

As usual, we would like to congratulate members of the team for their successes. Dr Mehra Haghi was awarded a Humboldt fellowship. This highly prestigious fellowship will allow Mehra to spend a year overseas in Prof. Claus-Michael Lehr’s lab at the University of Saarbrücken in Germany. Mehra will use this opportunity to further develop her research in the area of advanced cell biology models of the lung and immunology. At the same time, Mehra was also awarded a Asthma Australia travel award. This will allow Mehra to further develop links with like minded researchers in the areas of respiratory science. 

Meanwhile, Paul and Daniela received Honorary Appointments as Adjunct Professors at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Daniela and Paul have a long history of collaboration with UTS academics and will continue to build on these collaborations via a number of projects and co-supervised students at the ithree institute (Cynthia Whitchurch) and Pharmacy (Fabio Sonvico). We would also like to congratulate Michele Pozzoli who has officially transferred from Masters to PhD candidature at UTS. Michelle is supervised by Fabio, Paul and Daniela and was also awarded a $1,000 Vice Chancellors travel grant this month. He will join members of the team at RDD in Puerto Rico in May.

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Respitech group on the WIMR terrace - March 2013

As usual, we would like to welcome new members/visitors and say goodbye to friends. Dave Lewis and Gemma Keegan from Chiesi returned to the Uk after a successful visit. A number of projects are already underway and the visit resulted in a number of new exciting research paths. Meanwhile Prof Carsten Ehrhardt joins us on sabbatical from Trinity College Dublin. The team are working with Carsten to develop a number of projects in the areas of applied respiratory cell molecular biology with a focus on transporters. He will give a seminar at the Institute next month. Prof Warren Finlay also visited us this month from the University of Alberta. Warren is working with the group to further establish projects in the area of nasal drug delivery. Finally, we would like to welcome Tim Cornish and Valentina Trotta to the group. Tim is undertaking an engineering honours year in the area of nasal flow path simulation and deposition and Valentina is a Cotutelle PhD student between The University of Sydney and Ferrara Universty (Italy) working in the area of anti-oxidants and respiratory therapy.

Download the information flyer here

The International Society for Aerosols in Medicine and the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research are proud to announce the 2014 Conference and Workshop at the WIMR Headquarters on 25-26 Sept 2014 in Sydney, Australia. The Topics for this year focus on paediatric respiratory medicine & bioequivalence of Inhaled formulations. Highlights include:

• Emerging therapies for paediatric diseases.
• The impact of your formulation on PK
• Regulatory hurdles for paediatric therapy
• The in vitro in vivo correlation challenge; formulation prediction.
• Current practice and state-of-the-art for treating lung disease in children
• Methodological approaches for IVIVC

• Podium presentations
• Posters sessions
• Hands on workshop
• Roundtable discussions
• Conference dinner
• Social events and networking

Confirmed Keynote speakers

Prof. Peter R. Byron. E Claiborne Robins Professor and Chairman Department of Pharmaceutics. Virginia Commonwealth University.

Prof Mark Everard. Winthrop Professor/McCusker Chair in Paediatric Respiratory Medicine, School of Paediatrics and Child Health, The University of Western Australia.

The call for abstracts and early bird registration will open on the 1st April 1st 2014. To learn more about the conference please visit www.woolcock.org.au/isam2014

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

February has been a successful month for the RespiTech group with a number of announcements, developments and new team members.

Firstly, the National Health and Medical Council of Australia awarded members of the team a $401,708 NHMRC Development Grant, entitled ‘CSI Sydney’, to develop a formulation that targets chronic sinus infection and conduct a number of first in human imaging studies using a sinus targeting device. The grant was awarded to CIs Paul Young, Daniela Traini (RespiTech, Woolcock & Sydney Medical School USyd), Greg King (Physiology, Woolcock & Sydney Medical School USyd), Dale Bailey (Northern Clinical School, Usyd) (Ramin Rohanizadeh, Pharmacy, USyd), Cynthia Whitchurch (iThree Institute, UTS) and is partnered with a local pharmaceutical company AFT. Both The story was picked up by the ABC National radio service and local radio. Both Paul and Greg discussed the problems associated with sinus infection on a number of interviews and talk-back shows.

The RespiTech team along with the Respiratory Cellular and Molecular Biology group were also successful in receiving a grant from the Rebecca L. Cooper Medical Research Foundation. The grant, worth $22,000 will be used to purchase a electric cell-substrate impedance sensing (ECIS) instrument for studying respiratory cell cultures.

There was more reason to celebrate when the Woolcock organised a morning tea to award one of the RespiTech postdocs, Wing Hin a $10,000 ECR grant. Wing will use this seed funding to develop his research on targeted respiratory cancer therapy. 

Meanwhile, John Chan had a paper accepted in Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences entitled “A novel inhalable form of rifapentine” This work forms the basis of the groups ongoing TB targeting research program.

RespiTech members enjoyed a number of social events in February. The Italian contingent organised a farewell pizza dinner for ‘YY, the boss’ at Fratelli Fresh while Yang organised a second outing for beer, sushi and karaoke. YY will now spend the next 12 months in Southampton with Prof Joy Conway’s group establishing a collaboration in the area of medical imaging. She will keep us updated via a new blog.

As usual we like to introduce new members of RespiTech team and welcome visitors. Matteo Padroni joins us from Ferrara, Nadine Vermeiren from the Netherlands and Emelie Britt Linnea Land is a local grad student. Matteo is working in the area of antibiotic therapy, Nadine in aerosol particle formation mechanics and Emelie on the use of Spacer in emergency room treatment. Finally, we would like to welcome visitors Dr Dave Lewis and Dr Gemma Keegan. Dave and Gemma, are from Chiesi’s Innovation centre in the UK. Dave and his team have a long history of working with our group and their visit to Australia is to firm up the focus of a number of projects including our joint ARC Linkage program and co-supervision of PhD student Yang. Welcome!

Members of the RespiTech team and Lung Physiology group at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research (WIMR) and the University of Sydney have been successful in securing a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Development Grant. Associate Professors Paul Young, Daniela Traini and Greg King (WIMR), along with Prof Dale Baily (Central Clinical School), Dr Ramin Rohanizadehh (Pharmacy) and A/Prof Cynthia Whitchurch (UTS iThree Institute) have been awarded $401,708 to research and develop a series of technologies for targeting chronic sinus infection.

Chronic sinus infection (CSI) is prevalent and results in severe discomfort and pain for many Australians; yet, has no specific cure or effective treatment. Our multi-disciplinary research team and an Australian health and medical research company, (AFT Pharmaceuticals) have partnered to develop a novel device that specifically targets the sinuses in conjunction with a formulation capable for simultaneously removing mucus, dispersing biofilms and killing bacteria in the nasal cavities. The Project will commence in the first quarter of 2014 and will run for 2-years.

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.

Members of the RespiTech team have been working with the Woolcock to produce a short video that highlights the uniqueness of our institute. You can watch the video by clicking on the image above or following the link: http://vimeo.com/respitech/welcome-to-the-woolcock

You can learn more about the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research, our clinics and research at www.woolcock.org.au. Learn more about the Respiratory Technology team at the Woolcock at www.RespiTech.org. And don't forget to like RespiTech at www.Facebook/RespiTech.

Wing-Hin Lee

Wing-Hin Lee has been awarded the inaugural Woolcock ECR grant. Wing will receive $10,000 as seed funding to develop a research program within the Respiratory Technology group. The seed funding will support his proposal, entitled ' Inhalable iron oxide nanoparticles for imaging and cancer therapy: from bench to bedside', to develop an advanced nano technology based lung cancer therapy. Wing was one of 6 early career researchers who presented at the Woolcock Think Tank in November 2013 and submitted a grant proposal. The Board of the Woolcock ranked these proposals and awarded Wing the seed funding grant. All the proposals were outstanding and the Research Committee will  work with all the ECRs to develop these projects into potential external funding proposals.