Merry Christmas and happy new year

Photo by Lena Khrupina from Pexels

Today, our lab is open for the last time in 2020. We’re switching off the lab lights, and switching on the Christmas lights.

We’re still two weeks away from 2021, of course, but I’m sure we’ll remember 2020 as an extraordinary year filled with challenges. With challenges come opportunities to solve them. We took those opportunities.

Thanks to everyone in my team who’s worked tirelessly this year on the various projects to make a small but important difference in the world. Thanks also go to everyone who supported our research, including our collaborators, administrative team and technical staff, as well as all those who took an interest in our research.

We will reopen on 4 January 2021. Till then, merry Christmas and happy new year!

Image credit: Photo by Lena Khrupina from Pexels

We’re hiring

We’re looking for a Research Associate/Assistant to join our lab to develop a smart drug delivery system that empowers patients to self-care. Adverts are out on the University’s job site and jobs.ac.uk.

Closing date for applications: 5 December 2020.

We welcome informal enquiries. Please direct them to keng.ng@newcastle.ac.uk.

Update 18 December 2020: Applications have now closed and we’ve entered the shortlisting stage. Thank you for all your interest.

Review: Silica nanoparticles in transmucosal drug delivery

Graphical abstract

Our latest review in drug delivery is about silica nanoparticles, published this week in the open access journal, Pharmaceutics.

This is a collaborative paper with Professor Vitaliy Khutoryanskiy (University of Reading, UK), Dr Twana M. Ways (University of Sulaimani, Iraq), and our own Dr Wing Man Lau (Newcastle University, UK). In the paper, we examine the applications of silica nanoparticles in transmucosal drug delivery. We discuss different types of silica nanoparticles and their methods of preparation, including surface functionalisation strategies to facilitate interactions with mucosal surfaces.

The paper is published under the very permissive Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), which allows you to freely share and adapt the work as long as the source is appropriately cited. Please cite this work as:

M. Ways TM, Ng KW, Lau WM, Khutoryanskiy VV (2020) Silica nanoparticles in transmucosal drug delivery. Pharmaceutics 12(8):751. doi: 10.3390/pharmaceutics12080751

Perspective: The diagnostic potential of microneedles in infectious diseases

The recent COVID-19 pandemic brought the healthcare systems in many countries to their knees. One of the key problems that became evident early on was the lack of diagnostic tools that were rapid and readily accessible to the public.

Diagnostics is what we do as a research team. Naturally, we contemplated what we could do in a situation like this. The result is a perspective article published in Precision Nanomedicine, the official journal of the European Foundation for Nanomedicine.

The conclusion? Microneedle systems excel in many ways as a diagnostic tool. Various microneedle platforms have demonstrated advantages of portability, self-administrability, affordability and scalability over other diagnostic platforms. The potential is huge but the technology is still in its infancy. We need more research to turn that potential into tangible clinical benefits, but we can’t do it alone. Cross-disciplinary collaboration and stakeholder support will be needed to drive this effort forward.

The article is published under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, so please feel free to distribute widely, adapt and reuse for non-commercial purposes, and share any derived work, citing:

Dixon RV, Lau WM, Moghimi SM, Ng KW (2020) The diagnostic potential of microneedles in infectious diseases. Precision Nanomedicine 3(4):629–640 . https://doi.org/10.33218/001c.13658

Lab hiatus

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have temporarily shut down all lab experiments until further notice. All team members are following government advice to work from home. We will be monitoring the situation closely and hope to be back in operation as soon as the situation improves. In the meantime, we will be working on those overdue papers…

Skin bank

This week, we achieved a major milestone in our research capabilties. We established a skin bank to ensure a steady supply of skin samples for our research. At present, the skin bank contains porcine and murine skin samples. We may expand this to include other skin samples in the future.

The team was understandably thrilled when we received our first skin donations to the skin bank. Hassan, Rach and Trevor all had a go at processing the skin samples for storage. These skin samples will be put to good use in the coming weeks and months.

Here’s Rach, the self-proclaimed pig barber at work:

Welcoming Hassan

Just as we were about to wind down our lab operations for Christmas, we welcomed postdoctoral research associate, Dr Hassan Elsana, into our team this week. Hassan will be working on an EPSRC-funded project researching microneedle-mediated drug delivery in the skin.

This project is a collaboration with Dr Wing Man Lau (School of Pharmacy) and Dr Katarina Novakovic (School of Engineering). We have high hopes for this project.

Exciting times ahead, and I don’t just mean Christmas!

Welcome, team!

This week, I welcome 4 new team members into the team:

Cerys Evans is an MPharm student who will be investigating microneedle coating strategies for dermal drug delivery over the next 10 weeks.

Rachael Dixon joins us to develop a novel skin health monitor, in a joint effort between the School of Pharmacy and the Institute of Cellular Medicine. Professor Syed Moein Moghimi, Professor Mark Birch-Machin and Dr Philip Manning are co-supervisors.

Grace Young starts her PhD research formulating an antimicrobial delivery strategy to combat biofilms. The project, led by Dr Wing Man Lau and co-supervised by Dr Nick Jakubovics and myself, is a collaboration between the School of Pharmacy and the School of Dental Sciences.

Georgia Peavoy joins us to develop a novel diagnostic device for detecting nerve damage in diabetic patients. This is a collaborative project with Dr Roger Whittaker (lead supervisor, Institute of Neuroscience) and Professor Anthony O’Neil (School of Engineering).

I hope they enjoy their time with us and have a productive research project in the months and years ahead.