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I'm Yvonne Perrie, I'm Professor in Drug Delivery here
in Aston Pharmacy School. I'm mainly interested in
drug delivery, so that's from taking a drug
into a formulation that a patient can take, so we see
small tablets like Ibuprofen - we've all taken that -
it has a drug in it but only a small amount of it's a drug
and the rest of it, we package it up into a way that's easy for us to take
and has a good effect for us. One thing we're focusing on is using
nanotechnology to improve the delivery and targeting of the drug
so that means that after it enters the patient's body,
it gets to the right site of action, so it means you get a better
effect with less side effects, which is a key thing for everybody.
We work with a range of people including large pharmaceutical industry,
they have many drugs that they need to package in a way that we can take as a patient
and they need to get them onto the market so that they're palatable and easy to take, so we've
been looking at ways
of improving that. The other area we're looking at is we're working with large consortia
and looking at developing new vaccines to tackle both old diseases
that we haven't go under control and new diseases that are coming through.
There's three main areas that we really need to tackle in health care,
particularly in the use of drugs and medicines.
One of the areas is biological medicines. This is one of the areas that we see coming through,
they're very expensive and we see the debate in the NHS
just in the UK - can we afford it? And that's a global problem, obviously.
So it's looking a way of creating medicines that
use biologicals in a cheap and effective way. Biological medicines are very unstable
so we're talking proteins, peptides -
they don't like extremes of temperature, they don't like to be stored for a long time so
we need a way that we can get them so they're stable for a longer term
and that makes them cheaper and more accessible for the patient.
The second area is looking at
developing better vaccines, both for old diseases that we can't treat
effectively - ***, TB and Malaria - there are three global killers and we don't have
effective vaccines for any of them yet.
So we're working with collaborators to try and address that
and produce more, safer, effective vaccines.
The third area is looking at new drugs that have problems with solubility -
that's to say, they don't dissolve in water. So we're using various ways to try and
address that and improve
the delivery of these drugs. One of the main areas we are looking at is vaccines.
So one thing we're looking at is trying to get us a
freeze-dry product, a stable product that's dry
and you can take, on your own without going to see the doctor.
Send it out via the post, mass-vaccination, easy to take
and would be effective. So, if we had an outbreak of influenza, for example, we could post out
a dose for each person in the family, they could take it
and it would work for them - they wouldn't have to go and see the nurse or the medic.
Well there's two aspects of my job really - one is teaching the next generation
of pharmacists and that's exciting because you see them growing up through their career,
we have them here for four years, they go on and they qualify to be a pharmacist.
The second area is obviously it's exciting to see your research progress and have
an impact and hopefully improve health care - that's why we're here.
So we've been working in collaboration with the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen -
they have a vaccine that they've been taking into clinical trials.
This is a vaccine that will be used to protect against TB, so we have a vaccine
available at the moment - works good in the UK, doesn't work so well globally -
so we need a new one that's cheap and easy and effective to spread throughout
global vaccination. So they have a formulation, we've supported it and given
them input and helped develop it
and it's now gone onto phase 1 clinical trials, so that's very exciting to see.
So hopefully we'll have a new vaccine product coming on the market, that we can give
global protection against TB.