As the new Chair of UKICRS, I would first like to extend our thanks to David Brayden our past Chair for all his hard work which has let us be in the strong position we are in today. I also would like to thank him for his continued support to the committee. Within the committee we have had a few other changes, include Jayne Lawrence (King’s College, London) is now our Treasurer and Leab Sek from Patheon is our Secretary. Also joining the committee is Ian Hardy (MSD), so a warm welcome to Ian.

Since David’s last update in August, UKICRS have been busy organising and hosting a very successful full-day UKICRS symposium at BPC (2006) in Manchester. The co-Chairs for the sessions were committee members Simon Banks (Astra-Zeneca, UK), Abina Crean (University College Cork), Woei-Ping Cheng (Robert Gordon University of Aberdeen) and David Brayden (University College Dublin). 

In the keynote session of the day, Herbert Ringsdorf (Frankfurt, Germany) offered a historical perspective on the development of polymers and the importance of crucial interactions between the fields of materials sciences and life sciences, which have led to the current massive interest in biomedical nanomaterials and polymer therapeutics. Herbert Ringsdorf then received the Journal of Drug Targeting (JDT) Lifetime Achievement Award from the Editor, Saghir Akhtar (University of Cardiff) who outlined the list of achievements of this most worthy winner.  A special Issue of JDT in Professor Ringsdorf’s honour was then given to all members of the audience.

John Smart (University of Brighton) then followed on from this session, reviewing the mucoadhesion theory and giving an assessment of the status of thiolated polymers, chitosan and PEGylated co-polymers and discussed how these agents interacted with mucous in solid, liquid and semi-solid formats.

Howard Smith (Cambridge BioStability, Ltd, UK), outlined the development of stable glass microbeads for vaccine delivery.  Using spray-dried particles his research was aiming at overcoming the concerns with cold-chain requirements of vaccines which can cost over $200 million per annum.

Randy Mrsny (University of Cardiff and current President of the CRS) reviewed the topic of tight junction modulation for peptide delivery. Using molecular tools, he showed data on how the various proteins of the tight junction (TJ) have been dissected out and their function shown.  On the same theme, Thomas Leonard (Merrion Pharma, Dublin) described Gastro-Intestinal Permeation Enhancement Technology (GIPET), which comprises enteric-coated tablets or microemulsions of active agents in medium chain fatty acids.

The final theme of the session was methods to increase blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability.  Andreas Reichel (Schering Plough, Germany) reviewed the difficulty in getting drugs into the CNS and stated that only 3-5% of CNS candidate molecules ever get to market.  Reviewing the Molecular Trojan Horse approach pioneered by William Pardridge (UCLA), by which transferrin receptors have been targeted with antibody-linked liposomes with gene cargoes he noted that although evidence of gene delivery to primate brains is very encouraging, issues to be addressed include metabolism of plasmids in the CNS once they get there; this is currently a significant limitation on efficiency.

Bert de Boer (Gorlaeus Laboratories, The Netherlands) took on the topic of the lack of novel agents for CNS neurodegenerative disease in further detail.  In vitro, de Boer’s group has shown that CRM197-coated liposomes containing horse-radish peroxidase delivered substantial amounts of the cargo via the DT receptor.  Since the ligand is already approved and the receptor well characterized, there is an opportunity to move to gene delivery clinical trials within a reasonable time frame. More details of this meeting will be available in a report from the co-chairs our next newsletter.

Within the committee we are now working on our January meeting, to be held at Nottingham University and being organised by our co-Chairs: Colin Melia and Snow Stolnik (Nottingham), Sarah Dexter (3M) and Simon Banks (AZ). More details of this event are on the web-site.

So finally that just leaves me to say, looking forward to seeing you in Nottingham in January.

Best wishes,

Yvonne Perrie
Chair, UKICRS.

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