It’s no secret that BioProcess International hasn’t paid a lot of attention to the Controlled Release Society’s meetings and activities in the past. Until just last week, in fact, this year was no different. But a chance email asking whether I might be attending sent me off on a quick perusal of the program. (After all, I told myself, it’s right up the road — or rather, the Amtrak Cascades line — in Portland, OR, this year, and that certainly made for an easy trip.) I discovered the theme of this 37th Annual Meeting and Exposition of the CRS to be a promising "Personalized Medicine and Products for the Next Generation."

Having expected to see a lot of sessions about pills for human and veterinary applications, I was pleasantly surprised to find “Non-Parental Delivery of Biologics,” “Theranostics: Diagnosis and Treatment in One Box,” “Transdermal Drug Delivery,” “PEGylated Technologies,” “Vaccines,” “DNA Delivery,” “Liposomes,” “Tissue Engineering,” and “Peptide & Protein Medicines,” among others in the CRS line-up this year. So what began with, Maybe I’ll pop up for a day, quickly became a three-day whirlwind jaunt to the Oregon Convention Center.

Today my eyes were opened to advances in nonparental delivery of biologics and peptides as well as theranostics and gene silencing. The most interesting presentations included “Nasal Delivery of Peptides and Proteins: Are We There Yet?” from Critical Pharmaceuticals and “Intestinal Permeation Enhancement for Poorly Absorbable Drugs: Matching Mechanism of Action with Biological Assessment." The latter almost served as a short course of its own from Professor David Brayden at University College Dublin in Ireland. On the veterinary side — where things tend to move somewhat faster than they do for human medicines — methods are being discovered to shepherd peptides, at least, across the mucosal membranes of the gut, particularly in the colon.

And for those of you working on such recalcitrant proteins you’d be happy just to get worthwhile bioavailability through the parenteral route, Maria Zepeda of Halozyme Therapeutics offered the intriguing “Dispersive Effects and Biodistribution of Recombinant Human Hyaluronidase Supportive of IV to SC Route of Administration Conversion.” She described how her company is making it possible for big proteins to get through capillary walls into circulation with only a subcutaneous injection. The solution? A proprietary recombinant human enzyme that temporarily degrades hyaluronan on capillary walls — just long enough to make them permeable to the drug. Pretty spiffy, huh? For more information, check out her company’s website.

In the exhibit hall, among all the unfamiliar faces, I recognized some BPI advertisers and contributors such as Asahi Kasei America, Bend Research Inc., Catalent Pharma Solutions, Microfluidics, Novozymes Biopharma, OctoPlus NV, and Thermo Scientific. Among the posters were a few I hope to see as papers in the pages of BPI someday: e.g., “Long-Term Protein Delivery from Organo Gel Formulations” from authors at SurModics, Inc.; “Microspheres for Sustained-Release Delivery of Erythropoietin in Native Form” from Shanghai JiaoTong University in China; “In Vitro Evaluation of Liposomes Containing Bio-Enhancers for the Oral Delivery of Macromolecules” from the University of Heidelberg in Germany; “A Genetically Engineered Targeted Biopolymer Designed for Cytoplasmic siRNA Delivery” from Washington State University; and posters on the characterization and stability of vaccine liposomes from Aston University in the United Kingdom.

Clearly what we once thought of as a niche technology meeting (and society) has — while we weren’t looking — broadened its scope to cover the full gamut of drug and vaccine delivery as well as touching on medical devices, cell therapies, and diagnostics. More on that later this week. If you’re interested in checking it out for yourself, next year’s annual meeting of the Controlled Release Society will take place 30 July through 3 August 2011 in National Harbor, MD. As much as I could go on about my adopted home of Oregon, I hear they have pretty good crab cakes back east, too!

—Cheryl Scott
senior technical editor