DDL2017 - Coffee, Friends and lots of Bees...!

Every year the DDL Organising Committee volunteer many hours to put together what's now become the largest respiratory drug delivery conference in the world, with over 750 like-minded people attending this year's event. I have the pleasure (and challenge) of attending wearing two hats - one as part of the committee and the other as PA Consulting - and each year the presentations and imagination of the exhibitors goes from strength to strength...

This year we decided to demonstrate connectivity for free - no electronics - only the sound produced by our inhaler (Melody) was used to connect it to a standard smartphone. We designed Melody to use the airway from Sun Pharma's Starhaler dry powder inhaler (DPI) (samples kindly provided by Prashant Kane) - as it utilises a powerful cyclonic deagglomeration engine and also produces a strong acoustic signature - in a similar manner to other swirl-based DPIs. So using only the inbuilt microphone of our standard-issue Samsung A3 smartphone, we're able to deduce inspiratory flowrate in real-time, and use this to control game-play. Delegates hoping to win either a Sonos Play 3 or Sony Bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones attempted to keep Melody aloft for as long as possible, whilst avoiding oncoming pollen-laded bees or flowers, either of which could trigger an asthma attack and end the game. This was quite an ambitious challenge as we knew that the exhibition hall wouldn't be the quietest of environments, and although Szer Ming and Kian Min had done an outstanding job of dealing with high levels of background noise, we'd not fully anticipated our barista's coffee grinder - that simply sent Melody flying off the top of the screen...!

So well done to our winners, who demonstrated amazing inspiratory control. First place went to Claire Reece from Vectura with an outstanding score of 1,284! Second place went to Rodrigo Arias from DFE Pharma who couldn't quite reach Claire's level of control, but still achieved a highly impressive 1,174. Your prizes will arrive in time for Christmas - well done both!

It was great to see so many excellent stands in the exhibition hall this year - more exhibitors than ever had chosen to move away from the standard shell-scheme and instead had constructed custom-designed stands to showcase their company. And we had a number of very interesting presentations this year, including an excellent talk by Francesca Buttini for our brand new DDL Emerging Scientist Award, some fantastic posters and presentations for The Pat Burnell New Investigator Award, won this year by Ayasha Patel from King's College London. As the standard of submissions continues to increase in quality and quantity each year, our job as organisers becomes increasingly more difficult. But it's a nice problem to have...

I also found some time early one morning (almost first light :-/ ) to climb up Arthur's Seat in Holyrood Park. For any of you who haven't done this before, I strongly recommend it - the views are incredible and my phone photos really don't do it justice. You have to see it for yourself...

And finally, on the topic of coffee...

After roasting beans at home for over 11 years I finally worked up the courage to inflict them on the DDL audience - actually, the beans seemed to go down quite well (sigh of relief :-) ). I still consider every roast an experiment - over 250 chemical reactions occur during the roasting process, with numerous influencing factors. Whilst one can strive to control everything as well as possible to achieve consistent results, there's still a little bit of black art to coffee roasting, so I'm sure I've still got many more year's worth of learning and improvement through further experimentation. But for those of you who were able to try it - I hope you enjoyed it! And credit to Tom from The Barista - I'm sure with his skills he could create awesome coffee from almost any beans, and I don't know if you tried his Belgian hot chocolate...?

So after the best week of the year for those of us lucky enough to work in the respiratory sector, it was time to catch the train home - and say goodbye to Edinburgh and DDL until 2018. Thanks to my fellow committee members for putting in the hard work to make this happen - particularly to Sheila and Nikki who keep us all in check :-) Thanks also to all of you who attended / presented / exhibited - I hope you all found it as useful and enjoyable as we did - and looking forward to making a buzz again next year...