In vitro and In Silico Predictions of Orally Inhaled Drug Product In Vivo Performance

Dr. Shah is a pharmaceutical consultant. He retired from the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) after serving for 30 years. While at the FDA, he developed several Regulatory Guidance for the Pharmaceutical Industry in the area of biopharmaceutics, including a guidance on the dissolution of IR and ER products. He is the author/co-author of over 330 scientific papers and co-editor of four books. Dr. Shah was the President of American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) in 2003. He is a Fellow of AAPS and FIP. Dr. Shah is a recipient of FDA Award of Merit, FIP Lifetime Achievement Award in Pharmaceutical Sciences; IDMA Eminent Pharmaceutical Analyst Award (India); Honorary Doctorate from Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary; Honorary Doctorate from University of Medicine and Pharmacy Carol Davila Bucharest, Romania; SPDS Award of Excellence; AAPS Distinguished Pharmaceutical Scientist Award and AAPS Global Leader Award.

Deanna Mudie, Ph.D., is a Principal Scientist in Research and Development at Lonza. Her focus is on enabling bioavailability enhancing amorphous solid dispersions by developing dosage form platforms and in vitro dissolution methodologies to predict bioperformance. Deanna earned her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences and B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan. She has seven years of pre-doctoral experience at two large pharmaceutical companies developing and manufacturing oral dosage forms from pre-clinical to commercial scale.

Elizabeth Bielski, M.S., Ph.D. is a Senior Pharmacologist working at Division of Therapeutic Performance-I (DTP-I), Office of Research and Standards (ORS), Office of Generic Drugs (OGD), Center of Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the FDA since October 2022. Prior to her role as a Senior Pharmacologist, she served as a Pharmacologist (October 2020-October 2022) and as a Chemist (January 2020 t-October 2020) within DTP-I. Her areas of expertise involve orally inhaled and nasal drug products (OINDPs) and drug-device combination products (DDCPs). She is actively involved in developing general and product-specific guidances, addressing controlled correspondences, pre-ANDA meeting requests, citizen petitions, internal consults, and collaborating on current research projects to promote generic drug development of OINDPs and DDCPs. Prior to joining the FDA, she served as an ORISE Fellow at FDA within DTP from August 2018-December 2019. Elizabeth completed her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI, USA) in July 2018 encompassing work also conducted at Department of Chemistry at the University of São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil) and Department of Pharmaceutics at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA, USA) related to novel inhaled drug delivery strategies for treatment of lung cancer and lung metastases. Prior to receiving her doctorate, she received her Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Physics Honors with University Honors in 2011, and her Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering in 2012 from Wayne State University.

Dr. Ross Walenga joined the FDA in 2015 as an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Fellow. He is currently a Chemical Engineer at the Division of Quantitative Methods and Modeling at the Office of Research and Standards. He began his career at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), where he earned a Bachelor Science in Aerospace Engineering. He later earned his Ph.D. in Engineering (mechanical track) from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2014, where he also spent seven months as a postdoctoral fellow prior to joining the FDA. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics modeling of orally inhaled, nasal, ophthalmic, and dermal drug products to answer questions pertaining to bioequivalence.

James Mullin is a Senior Principal Scientist at Simulations Plus, Inc. and has a graduate degree in Chemical Engineering. In his role at Simulations Plus, he contributes to modeling and simulation development and consulting activities across multiple programs including GastroPlus, MembranePlus, and DDDPlus. Most recently, James is participating in an FDA grant project to extend the capability of Gastroplus to predict local tissue concentrations by enhancing the model structure. Additionally, he has developed models to predict partitioning in pulmonary tissues and simulate inhalation of vapors for purposes of toxicological modeling and assessments. James has 19 years’ experience in PBPK modeling, computational fluid dynamics, and mathematical modeling.