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Aerosol Newsletter December 2011

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   AEROSOL eNEWSLETTER
 


CONTENTS


Featured Event ISAM 2011 - The International Society of Aerosols in Medicine

Featured Event EAC 2011 - European Aerosol Conference 2011

Featured Product - The Biral Aerosol Particle Collector

Featured Product - Ramem's Ioner range of aerosol instruments

Biral Distributor News

 


LATEST NEWS


  • Biral attends ECM, ISAM and EAC conferences over Summer 2011.

  • The Biral Aerosol Particle Collector makes its debut at the European Aerosol Conference in Manchester.

     

  • At the European Aerosol Conference the Alan Cussens Memorial Award was presented to Christoph Kellenberger, Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering, ETH Zurich. To find out more about Christoph please click here.  


  • Biral is now the official distributor of Ramem-Ioner instruments in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. To learn more about Ramem please visit www.ioner.eu. See also featured products below.

  • In association with the Aerosol Society, Biral will be hosting a Volcanic Ash Cloud meeting to invite researchers, meteorological institutions and industry to participate.

  • Biral Aspect and AFS software updates to be released.


  • Biral attended the DDL22 (Drug Delivery to the Lungs) In Edinburgh this December 2011, a full review will be in the next Biral Aerosol newsletter

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ISAM logo

FEATURED EVENT
ISAM  18-22 June 2011


The papers presented biomedical and largely academic/clinical. Most of the presentations gave a very good indication of where drug delivery to the lung is going. Compared what we have seen from DDL over the past 2-3 years this conference gave a very encouraging picture of rapid diversification from the traditional asthma bronchodilators that have dominated the industry. The new treatments described almost all require better particle engineering and characterisation than the more traditional bronchodilator delivery.

It was very clear that the big new field is the treatment of the symptoms of Cystic Fibrosis (CF). In this disease control of respiratory degradation is key to both increasing the quality of life of older patients and extending survival. Apparently the primary cause of death in these patients is chronic infection of the lung by Pseudomonas aerugonosa. It has been found that direct delivery of certain antibiotics to the lung is much more successful in treating these infections than oral or IV delivery. Current delivery techniques use nebulisation of aqueous suspensions, which have a very short shelf life. There is a race on between drug companies to produce freeze-dried spheres suitable for dry powder delivery, which should offer some opportunities for Aspect as good dispersibility (and so sphericity) is key to effective delivery. A number of groups are also investigating the direct delivery of antibiotics to the lung for other conditions such as tuberculosis.

A very new field that is just reaching the human trials stage is the use of bacteriophages as an alternative to conventional antibiotics for organisms that have developed resistance. This may offer a different opportunity as bacteriophages are generally specific to only one bacterium and so one shortcoming that was highlighted was that the prescribing clinician would need to be certain which organism was causing an infection which is not the case with antibiotics. This could be an opportunity for immuno assay based instruments as the requirement would be for speed and low cost rather than the very high sensitivity offered by PCR.
 
EAC 2011 Logo


Biral stand at EAC 2011

Biral stand at the EAC 2011


Christoph Kellenberger receiving the Alan Cussens Memorial Award

Christoph Kellenberger (right) recipient of  the Alan Cussens Memorial Award with Professor Don Clark Cheif Scientific Officer, Biral (left)

FEATURED EVENT

European Aerosol Conference - Manchester 4th to 9th September, 2011


Manchester more than lived up to its reputation by giving us very wet and windy weather for the week of the conference. However the venue proved to be an excellent choice with good, well equipped lecture theatres and very effective spaces for the exhibition and the numerous posters. Numbers attending the conference were high at around 800 despite the economic problems affecting many countries

There were no major new trends observable from the papers and posters, rather a continuation of trends from previous conferences. Nanoparticles remain a dominant interest across many fields with significant growth in their use for a variety of microengineering applications. This growth in the generation, or potential generation of nanoparticles in a wide variety of materials has given rise to industrial and public health concerns, which were addressed in quite a number of papers and posters.

Other areas of growing interest include: geoengineering of the climate, where confidence appears to be increasing in the potential of aerosols to provide a temporary solution to climate change while carbon emissions are reduced. Bioaerosols are of growing interest in a number of areas from therapy to cloud physics and the effects of volcanic ash clouds on aviation featured in quite a large number of papers, for obvious reasons.

In instrumentation there remains a strong interest in reducing even further the limits of particle size measurement using mobility analysis. At the other end of the scale, real time chemical analysis in the aerosol phase continues to grow for component identification in mixed aerosols.

In every aerosol conference there seems to be at least one paper on an extraordinary subject. In Manchester this was a paper on an investigation into the small but very real (3 fatalities to date) hazard of African drumming. The hazard arises from the use of skins from animals infected with anthrax and the long-lived spores in the skin can then be aerosolised by the energetic drumming action with consequent infection of the drummer.
 
 Aerosol Particle Counter

FEATURED PRODUCT
The Aerosol Particle Collector (APC)


The Biral Aerosol Particle Collector (Biral APC) uses wetted wall cyclone technology to collect aerosol particles from a large volume of air into a small volume of liquid, to enable direct sample transfer to biological or chemical analysis systems.

The Biral Aerosol Particle Collector can be used for any application where particles are required to be in aqueous suspension for the analysis process.

 For more information please click on Aerosol Particle Collector
 
Electrometer
High Voltage Source

The Ioner range of aerosol instruments from Ramem

Ramem SA have developed proprietary technology for Aerosol and Volatile Detectors resulting in the IONER® brand, a complete line of equipment to classify and detect ions, volatiles, nanometric and sub micrometric particles.

Biral are now the official Ramem distributor in the UK and Republic of Ireland

Please click aerosol dilution and conditioning instruments to see all instruments in this category including the Ioner range.

Alternatively for an overview of Ioner's instruments for Electrospray deposition, particle charging, ultra-low current measurement and ion mobility spectrometer please click on Ioner newsletter
 
 

Biral Distributor News

Biral’s new aerosol distributors to join our global distribution network:
  • Peaceful Pioneer Technology in Taiwan
  • Ampere in Mexico
  • Ramem-Ioner in Spain

To see a full list of all our distributors please visit Distributors

Other Biral News