SPIRITUS: (02-18) A Monthly update from the Respiratory Technology team at the WIMR.

This is the February 2018 newsletter from the RespiTech Group at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research.

This month, Daniela Traini was awarded a Australian Research Council linkage grant. The Linkage program parters industry and academic institutes to conduct translation research. The grant funding from the ARC was $555,000 and the grant is titled "Smart hybrid system for the formulation and design of dry powder inhalers.Collaborators include David Fletcher (Engineering at Sydney), Julio Soria (Monash University) and David Lewis (Chiesi Innovation Centre, UK). The project aims to develop a greater understanding of the link between inhaler device components and the dry powder formulation within. From this understanding, the project will develop a hybrid model for the design and manufacture of dry powder inhalers with improved aerosol deposition performances as well as an enhanced capacity to predict formulation performance. The long term benefits will be improved delivery efficiency and shorter development times, leading to reduced manufacturing costs. You can learn more about Respitech competitive grants here.

This month the group published two Journal articles. The first accepted in International Journal of Pharmaceutics had first-author Maliheh Ghadiri The article was titled "The use of fatty acids as absorption enhancer for pulmonary drug delivery." The second article was accepted in Pharmaceutical Research and was titled "Sweetening Inhaled Antibiotic Treatment for Eradication of Chronic Respiratory Biofilm Infection."  Authors included J Loo & W Lee (Malaysia) S Scalia & G. Lauretani (Ferrara) D. Cipolla (Aradigm) and  D. Traini, P. Young and H. X. Ong (YY) (Sydney) The paper was related to the ongoing Linkage program with Aradigm in San Francisco. You can learn more about RespiTech publications here.