Dear AAPS members–
Few things energize me more during any given month than the enthusiasm, the energy, and the great ideas that our member volunteers bring to AAPS every day. The AAPS Communities have become the go-to place for information sharing, lively scientific discussion, and idea generation for our members across all the different disciplines we represent. Just browsing the ongoing conversations usually gives me an intellectual boost in the morning.
Unsurprisingly, the monthly Community Leaders Forum calls are also generally abuzz with good conversation. This week's meeting was no different! @Mark Arnold gave the group a detailed look behind the curtain and into how PharmSci 360 is supported by volunteers on many committees, including the Scientific Programming Committee that he is chairing this year. It was a great reminder of how many moving pieces must come together to produce such an incredibly content-rich meeting! A lot of our conversation focused on how we will give our members the best interactive experience they can possibly have this year. After all, bringing our scientists together to share their data is our mission!
We are working especially hard on enhancing the experience for our poster authors-both at the forthcoming NBC, and at PharmSci 360. We are ensuring that all our authors have access to live conversations with attendees. (Don't forget-NBC's poster abstract submission deadline is just two weeks away-submit your research!)
My new favorite part of the monthly Community Leaders Forum call (Thank you for the idea, @Joleen White!) is when Community Leaders share new ideas and best practices from their work to engage members in their communities. I have enjoyed hearing so much discussion at these last couple of meetings about collaboration between communities of allied interest. There is a lot of "connecting the dots" going on between our volunteer leaders.
hepatotoxicity-a special thank you to our BOD member @Shraddha Thakkar for moderating! I am already looking ahead to next week as well-@Parag Kolhe will talk about vaccine drug product development, and it looks like he will give us a broad tour of different formulation challenges we might face based on the type of vaccine in development. Since he also mentioned case studies, I hope we'll get a glimpse into the workings of how his employer, Pfizer, is supplying an extremely important vaccine to fight the global COVID-19 pandemic.
I hope you are also setting aside time to read while the days are shorter and wintery temps keep us inside. There is great science coming your way in all our journals! In the context of the much-considered topic of vaccine formulations that facilitate rapid scale-up and produce a vaccine that is highly stable over a range of conditions encountered in global distribution, it is great to read about cutting-edge advances in lyophilization approaches. I was fascinated by @Akhilesh Bhambhani et al.'s AAPS PharmSciTech paper about the Evaluation of Microwave Vacuum Drying as an Alternative to Freeze-Drying of Biologics and Vaccines: the Power of Simple Modeling to Identify a Mechanism for Faster Drying Times Achieved with Microwave-both the idea of using microwave vacuum drying, and also their approach to simplified modeling are fascinating. To me, research like this is yet another reason to let our science inspire you to look up and ahead!
Tina
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