High-dose antibiotics inhalers for acute lower respiratory tract infections in primary care

Acute lower respiratory tract infections are responsible for hospital admissions and deaths, affecting the health, safety and life quality of millions of people every year. Currently, available treatment for these diseases requires systemically delivered high-dose antibiotics with frequent administration, thus contributing to antimicrobial resistance. Pulmonary drug delivery has been recognised as one of the most efficient routes for lung diseases due to its potential capacity of providing a rapid onset of action, delivering effective drug concentrations directly into the lungs, and obtaining better therapeutic effects. Dry powder formulations provide a strategy to reduce the limitations of conventional treatments. Despite of this, the design of inhalable aerosol formulations still confronts with various technical difficulties.

In this work, we will investigate the capacities of electrospray drying for addressing the current drawbacks of antibiotics dry powder formulations. Different pharmaceutical crystalline models will be designed to satisfy the urgent demands, high payload, improved aerodynamic deposition, optimised sustainable release and synergistic efficacy, etc. A range of analytical tools will be used to characterise the basic physicochemical performances of novel dry powder materials. Simultaneously, this project will implement artificial intelligence to gain a better understanding of the critical process parameters of electrospraying, accelerate the screening of suitable excipients and predict the physicochemical property of dry powder formulations. This project will provide the strong theoretical guidance for future technical innovation associated with dry powder products for lung infections in primary care.