PhD student, Giles Kirby awarded 1st prize for poster presentation

This April, Giles Kirby, a PhD student from our Division of Tissue Engineering and Drug Delivery, was awarded first prize for his poster presentation at the UK and Ireland Controlled Release Society annual symposium held at Queen's University, Belfast. The poster entitled “Sustained Delivery of an Active Growth Factor from Microparticles” was well received and showcases a microparticle platform technology with the potential to deliver a plethora of proteins in a sustained manner while maintaining biological activity. This particular presentation focused on the in vitro controlled release of Bone Morphogenetic Protein-2 (BMP-2) and its maintained ability to induce osteogenic differentiation and bone-like mineral deposition. This has potential applications in bone repair. There is currently limited use of BMP-2 clinically due, in part, to its high cost and short in vivo half-life. A controlled release system could mitigate these problems. Up until now a major boundary to this approach has been protein denaturation leading to loss of biological activity when subjected to the encapsulation and release from a pharmaceutical formulation