Dr. Elijah Nazarzadeh has obtained his PhD in Fluid Mechanics from King’s College London in 2012 and joined Phillips Hydrocolloids Research Centre after that. He provided scientific consultation services to various industries and has successfully led multiple projects. More recently he joined the University of Glasgow, developed a new platform for drug delivery to the lungs via acoustic nebulisation and awarded a personal fellowship form SETSquared (Innovate UK) to establish the business opportunity around this innovation.
Title: Platform for Targeted and Personalised Drug Delivery of High Value Medicines
Synopsis: The precise control over the size and dispersity of droplets, produced within aerosols, is of great interest across many manufacturing, food, cosmetic, and medical industries. Amongst these applications, the delivery of new classes of high value drugs to the lungs has recently attracted significant attention from pharmaceutical companies. This is commonly achieved through the mechanical excitation of surface waves at the air liquid interface of a parent liquid volume. We show that the droplet size distribution of aerosols can be controlled by constraining the liquid inside micron-sized cavities and coupling surface acoustic waves into different volumes of liquid inside micro-grids. In particular, we show that by reducing the characteristic physical confinement size (i.e., either the initial liquid volume or the cavities’ diameters), higher harmonics of capillary waves are revealed with a consequent reduction of both aerosol mean size and dispersity. In doing so, we provide a new method for the generation and fine control of aerosols’ sizes distribution
