AAPS Symposium 

November 13, 2007

Anhydro hosted the Spray Drying Symposium at the AAPS Annual Meeting in San Diego today. Six leading experts from around the world shared their spray drying expertise, thoughts and experience with more than 60 VIP guests, making the Spray Drying Symposium a huge success.

Anna Fureby, Ph.D., YKI, Institute for Surface Chemistry

"Particle Design and Formation in Spray Drying

Anna Fureby held a very interesting talk about particle and particle formation design in the spray drying process. She discussed every stage from particle size control to predicting particle size and density. Critical to particle structure design is a full understanding of the formulation and mechanisms in drying.

Jeffry Weers, Ph.D., Nektar

"Enabling Novel Pulmonary Products"

Jeffry Weers works at Nektar, a leading biopharmaceutical company. His talk concerned the processes involved in making novel pulmonary products for inhalers. Nektar uses spray drying with huge success for dry powder inhaler development. Nektar uses drying to affect the factors controlling the particle size and density requirements for spray dried particles. By using spray drying, Nektar is able to tailor particle size with the best aerodynamic properties for their pulmonary products.

Jean Sung, Ph.D., Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

"Engineering porous particles of nanoscale dimensions for pulmonary drug and vaccine delivery"

Jean Sung focused on how porous particles of nanoscale dimensions for pulmonary drug and vaccine delivery are very important to avoiding infectious diseases around the world. This is particularly important in third world countries where TB is a common disease that kills a lot of people every year. Spray drying technology enables the production of vaccines and medicine that can be inhaled easily instead of being injected. Biomaterial platform technologies based on spray drying can produce aerosol drug and vaccine formulations with unique properties and advantages.

Vu L. Truong, Ph.D., Aridis Pharmaceuticals CA

"Stabilization of Thermally Labile Biologics Using Spray Drying"

Vu Truong's talk focused on spray drying process related stresses on biologics and how temperature, shear, pressure, surface tension pH, ionic strength shifts and dehydration affect the final result. Vu Truong explained how to optimize the process by using different drying methods such as spray drying, freeze drying and foam drying. The conclusion was that spray drying can be used to stabilize complex thermally labile biomaterials, the drying process method can impact activity recovery and stability, and solid state properties can also influence storage stability.

Dan Mohan, Ph.D., Applied Prime Technologies

"Challenges in Aseptic Spray Drying of Pharmaceuticals"

Dan Mohan is a world-leading expert with many years of experience in aseptic spray drying. He talked about the main reasons for choosing aseptic spray drying and the necessary requirements. The focus was on CIP / SIP considerations, de-pyrogenation challenges, sterilizing the spray solution, system integrity challenges and powder recovery issues, and how success depends on good planning, patience, persistence, partnership and passion!

Robert Turok, Anhydro, Director of Process Technology

"Challenges in Aseptic Spray Drying of Pharmaceuticals"

Robert "Bob" Turok is Anhydro's aseptic spray drying expert. He has worked together with Dan Mohan on various projects and has more than 20 years of experience in spray drying. Bob Turok gave a detailed insight into the entire aseptic spray drying process from A-to-Z, explaining at each stage how aseptic spray dryers work.

One thing is for sure - if there was anyone present who did not know much about aseptic spray drying before hearing Dan and Bob, they certainly did afterwards!