Bologna, Italy

Proceedings of the 3^rd European Conference on Pharmaceutics

I recently attended the Proceedings of the 3^rd European Conference on Pharmaceutics, where I had the chance to present some of the results obtained during the first year of my PhD with a poster called “Coated hydrogel-forming needles for intradermal drug delivery”. Unlike hypodermic metallic needles, which can cause needle stick injuries and require proper disposal procedures, I presented in this poster the development of needles that are prepared with gels made of gelatin-like materials, that once dried, are hard. Hence, I tested them to see if they can be inserted in skin models without breaking or bending….and they did! So the next step was coating them with a fluorescent dye, called rhodamine B, which acts like a model drug, and so allow us to visually assess with different microscopy techniques how this model drug would distribute once this new type of needle is inserted in the skin, confirming the potential of our research for the treatment of skin diseases such as basal cell carcinoma, a type of skin cancer that is very common in the UK.

Funny part of being in Italy: pizzas, pasta, tiramisu, ice cream and a night out with colleagues for some beers in a pretty accurate, according to my local colleagues, Irish Bar. A night out that ended with all of us soaked because of an unexpected rain and almost an hour trying to get a taxi to be back to the hotel.