News
BPC 2005 Prize winners
Two PhD students, working within the Pharmaceutical Science Research Division were awarded prizes at this year's British Pharmaceutical Conference 2005.
Dan Goodwin & See-wah Jai Tang, held thus year in Manchester. they presented their work to an audience of the country's experts from the pharmaceutical industry, as well as international visitors to this prestigious conference.
A presentation by Dan Goodwin, a third year PhD student working with Prof. Jayne Lawrence in the Molecular Biophysics Research Group, was selected as a commended oral presentation prize in the short talks on "Pharmaceutics and drug delivery" session at the recent British Pharmaceutical Conference in Manchester. Dan was awarded a £100 book voucher prize for his talk entitled 'Small angle neutron scattering (SANS) from polymer stabilised drug nanoparticles'.
Dan's research is concerned with understanding the mechanism of drug
nanoparticle stabilisation by hydrophilic polymers. These drug nanoparticles are of interest as they have been shown to be a means by which the oral bioavailability of poorly water-soluble drugs can be improved. SANS measurements carried out at the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France revealed that the amount of polymer adsorbed onto nanoparticles produced from the drug nabumetone and the thickness of the polymer layer remained constant as the molecular weight of the polymer varied. This indicates that the polymer adsorbs onto nabumetone nanoparticles in a relatively 'flat' conformation. In contrast, polymer was found to adsorb to a lesser extent and formed a much thinner absorbed layer on drug nanoparticles prepared from halofantrine. This work is thought to be the first time that SANS studies have been performed on drug nanoparticles. The research is supported by an Impact Faraday CASE studentship in collaboration with the EPSRC and GlaxoSmithKline.