CRS 2014 Chapter Report Chicago Canada Chapter

Transcription

1 Chapter Name: Canadian Chapter of the Controlled Release Society (CC-CRS) Date Established: 2009 Board of Directors (list names and positions): President: Todd Hoare McMaster University Department of Chemical Engineering 1280 Main St. W., Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4L7 Telephone: (905) ext Vice President: Brian Amsden Queen University Department of Chemical Engineering Biological Science Complex 1422a Kingston, ON K7L 3N6 Canada Telephone: (613) Secretary: Jeanne Leblond Chain University of Montréal Faculté de pharmacie Pavillon Jean-Coutu 2940, Chemin de la polytechnique Montréal, H3C 3J7 Telephone: (514) Treasurer: Samer Adeeb University of Alberta Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Markin/CNRL Natural Resources Engineering Facility Edmonton, T6G 2W2 Telephone: (780)

2 Past President: Michael R. Doschak University of Alberta Faculty of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences 2121 Dentistry/Pharmacy Centre Edmonton, AB T6G 2N8 Telephone: (780) Webmaster: Sina Eetezadi University of Toronto Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy 144 College St Toronto, ON M3S 3M2 Telephone: (416) Member-at-Large (Quebec): Mircea-Alexandru Mateescu Université Du Quebec CP 8888 Succursale Center-Ville Montreal, QC H3C 3P8 Telephone: (514) Member-at-Large (Quebec) Jake Barralet Professor McGill University Room M66 Faculty of Dentistry 3640 University Street Montreal, Quebec H3A 2B2 Telephone: (514) Member-at-Large (Maritimes): Amyl Ghanem Dalhousie University Process Engineering and Applied Science 1360 Barrington St Halifax, NS B3K 4Y5 Telephone: (902) Member-at-Large (Alberta): Larry Unsworth University of Alberta Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering National Institute for Nanotechnology Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2V4 Telephone: (780) Member-at-Large (Manitoba): Emmanuel A. Ho University of Manitoba Faculty of Pharmacy 750 McDermot Ave Winnipeg, R3E 0T7 Telephone: (204)

3 Meeting Coordinator: Marc Thibault Ecole Polytechnique Department of chemical engineering 2900 boul. Edouard-Montpetit Montreal, QC H3T 1J4 Telephone: (514) ext Student Board Members: Patricia Comeau - Publications Dalhousie University tacomeau@gmail.com Scott Campbell - Assistant Secretary McMaster University campbesb@mcmaster.ca Total number of chapter members: Chapter Activities: o Event name: 2014 Annual Meeting of CC-CRS Title: Promoting Today s Solutions for Tomorrow s Medicines o Event date: Centre Mont-Royal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; June 10-13, 2014 o Attendee total: 225 o Description: For the third time in the last four years, CC-CRS partnered with the Canadian Society for Pharmaceutical Sciences (CSPS) to hold an Annual Symposium, this year in Montreal, PQ. This 3-day conference focused on recent advances in both controlled release as well as pharmaceutical sciences and was preceded by a free workshop on Building Connections between academia and industry. The Canadian chapter of CRS organized 2 academic sessions on the topics Nanomedicine and Going Beyond Oral Delivery Strategies to Enable Drugs to Reach New Targets. CC-CRS also selected and hosted one of the two keynote speakers at the conference, You Han Bae of the University of Utah, who is heavily involved in CRS and gave an outstanding keynote on the challenges of nanomedicine in cancer treatment. The Montreal meeting schedule is attached together with a summary of the event which we will be submitting to the next CRS newsletter. o Event funding methods: The event was funded by a combination of registration fees (kept relatively low, particularly for students and trainees) and industrial sponsorships (including an exposition associated with the conference). o Event Highlights: We attempted, in conjunction with CSPS, to put together a diverse program that would attract attendees from multiple aspects of controlled release research. The session chairs announced the upcoming CRS Annual Meeting, which was also highlighted to all delegates at the conference during opening remarks from CC-CRS President Todd Hoare. We also hosted a booth at which we posted CRS 3

4 advertisements and distributed literature about the upcoming conference and membership application forms. The exhibit area during a networking break One of the networking break/poster sessions allowing attendees to make new contacts and see the latest in delivery science from across Canada Best poster award winner Rabia Mateen describing her research 4

5 Emmanuel Ho, CC-CRS Board member, giving his Early Career Award lecture o Sharing Success: As we are partnering with a like-minded academic societies to cohost the event, we attract a portion of their membership to the CRS academic sessions (with attendance in both CC-CRS hosted sessions far above the number of CC-CRS delegates at the conference). We signed up an additional 11 members at our dedicated CRS chapter booth (staffed by student travel award winners). The meeting further serves to bring together the national membership of our chapter from distant provinces, in order to hold our Annual General meeting. o Event name: CC-CRS Networking Event: Montreal o Event date: Pub L Ile Noire, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; June 11, 2014 o Description: The purpose of this event was as a mixer for CC-CRS members from across the country as well as with Biotech Annecto ( whose purpose is to facilitate networking between corporate researchers in the biotech industry and academic partners. o Event funding methods: This event was primarily funded via proceeds of last year s national conference, although the cost was split with Biotech Annecto to make it more cost-effective. o Attendee total: 55 o Event Highlights: While the focus of the event was on socializing (with sponsored drinks and appetizers), member sign-up forms were available and the activities of both CC-CRS and CRS were promoted both within the CC-CRS group as well as with Biotech Annecto members, most of whom were not aware of CRS or CC-CRS and will hopefully bring knowledge of the activities of both organizations back to their respective companies. o Sharing Success: Again, by partnering with another organization (in this case, an industrial network of corporate researchers in the Greater Montreal area), we were able to enhance the input and networking possibilities with local industry in a costeffective way, working with them to both share the expenses related to the event as well as working within their usual event framework to ensure a good turnout of potential industrial partners. In addition, a long-term link was formed in that Biotech Annecto offered the free use of their online meeting registration template for helping us with registrations for our planned local chapter events (see below). We were also able to recruit 4 new CC-CRS members as well as raise awareness of the existence of CC-CRS among multiple companies for potential future activities together. 5

6 (future) Chapter Activities: o Planned event name: 2015 Annual Meeting of CC-CRS o Planned event dates: May 26-30, Toronto, Ontario o Plans for success: Again, we are planning for success by partnering, both with CSPS (who has partnered with us before) as well as the Canadian Biomaterials Society (CBS), with which a few of the current CC-CRS board members have strong connections. Since the activities of CC-CRS (and CRS in general) lie between the biomaterials and pharmaceutical worlds, partnering with both organizations and their respective conferences is what we believe to be an outstanding opportunity to both raise the profile of CRS/CC-CRS to new audiences (both academic and industrial) and give our membership a very relevant event to attend regardless of where they lie in the spectrum of research activities within controlled release. The plan right now is to hold both the CSPS and CBS meetings separately but at near-by (within walking distance) venues on overlapping dates (May for CSPS and May for CBS, adhering to both organization s typical conference scheduling). One day of overlap will be scheduled between the conferences where attendees of either conference can attend the other conference for free. Right now, CC-CRS is 6

7 negotiating with both other organizations on how this will work, with a shared conference banquet likely in addition to the overlap conference day(s). In this way, CC-CRS is playing the key role in bringing these societies together and creating a single meeting with a critical mass of researchers in the area of controlled release and biomaterials in Canada in one geographic location. o Planned event name: Local Chapter Events o Planned event dates: January-February 2015 o Plans for success: For the first time, CC-CRS is planning a series of four local local chapter events in each region of Canada (East Halifax; Quebec Montreal; Ontario Toronto; West Winnipeg and Saskatoon). These events are aimed to be lower cost, student-focused events which will allow researchers, industrial representatives, and trainees in each region of the country with significant controlled release activities to meet together. The philosophy behind these events is to, unlike our other events, have CC-CRS as the sole sponsor (although we plan to promote within other societies in which our Board is involved) and bring trainees (particularly newer trainees) into our society early in their training, with the hope of seeding active, student-organized events locally throughout the country in the years ahead. Given the geographic expanse of Canada, such meetings are also important to allow more local collaborations to develop without incurring the often large travel expenses associated with travel to our national Annual Meetings. The events will all look a little bit different depending on the region and the size of the potential controlled release audience in each region, with the East event more focused on guest speakers from both academia and industry and networking and the Ontario and West events including both guest speakers as well as a 3-Minute Thesis competition for students, a poster competition for students, and an industryacademia mixer. We will be promoting CRS and CRS-related activities at all events and hope to increase Canadian membership (in particular, student membership) in CRS through these events. Note that these events will largely be funded through proceeds from past Annual Meetings coupled with (in some cases) provincial government matching funding to promote industry-academia exchanges as opposed to dedicated CRS funds, which will be more allocated to supporting attendance/travel at the CRS Annual Meeting as well as our national Annual Meeting. Chapter s involvement with CRS o CRS Annual Meeting: We promoted the CRS annual meeting both via and our quarterly newsletters (the last version of which is also attached to this ). We further sponsored two (competitive) trainee travel awards for students presenting research at the CRS Annual Meeting, promoting the attendance and participation of Canadian researchers in the meeting. At least 35 Canadian researchers will attend this year s Annual Meeting, a number we hope to increase in the years ahead. We are also planning an informal CC-CRS mixer at the Chicago conference to allow Canadian researchers to network. 7

8 o Publication in the CRS Newsletter: We have prepared a newsletter submission for the next edition of the CRS Newsletter (attached to this report). We will prepare at least one additional newsletter article on our local events planned this fall/spring as well as an additional article on next year s national conference. We are also in the process of revitalizing and updating our website to a newer format that will be easier to update, allowing our student membership to help generate content on Canadian controlled release activities which may be also submitted to the CRS Newsletter/News Capsule. o Contribution to CRS News Capsules: We have and will continue to promote upcoming CC-CRS events through the CRS News Capsule. o Promotion of CRS Annual Meeting: As noted above, we promoted the CRS Annual Meeting via both as well as our quarterly newsletter. We also promoted the Annual Meeting via a dedicated CC-CRS booth at our national conference (including handouts provided by CRS Central) and will promote next year s annual meeting in Scotland (with literature available) at all of our local and national chapter events next year (see a picture of our booth below). Our new website will also make signing up as a CC-CRS member much easier than it is now (a direct webform instead of an based process), which we anticipate will make it easier to recruit new members and thus expand our distribution list for promoting the CRS Annual Meeting. o Promotion of CRS Membership: In each edition of our quarterly newsletter, we are highlighting one key benefit of CRS membership to our members. We also had CRS membership forms available at our CC-CRS booth at the Montreal national conference together with posters provided by CRS Central highlighting CRS membership benefits. We will continue to have these items at each local chapter 8

9 event as well as next year s national conference. Finally, we have made a push to have the entire Board be members of CRS, not just the required delegates, as we believe this is important to promote CRS activities in Canada. Report submitted by Todd Hoare (Canada Chapter President, ). 9