Mohammad Momin is a final year PhD candidate under the supervision of Dr Shyamal Das and Professor Ian Tucker. He is very passionate about lab-based research which can be translated into service for humanity.
Improving drug delivery for tuberculosis treatment
"Despite being curable, tuberculosis (TB) remains a major global health burden. One-third of the world's population is infected with TB bacteria and as recently as 2015, 1.5 million people died of this disease. The increasing emergence of drug-resistant TB poses further challenges for effective control of the disease with multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) causing particular concern. The current treatment through oral and injectable delivery is inadequate; it takes a long time (up to 30 months) to treat MDR-TB, and has high systemic toxicity.
"Pulmonary drug delivery by dry powder inhaler is an emerging approach which has the potential to shorten the treatment time and avoids systemic toxicity by direct delivery of drugs to the target site. Traditional pulmonary delivery for the treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease requires a low dose whereas TB treatment would require a high dose.
"My research focuses on the development of a formulation platform enabling delivery of a high dose of drugs directly to the lungs, which can be useful for the treatment of TB to save millions of lives. The understanding of the physicochemical behaviour of the developed dry powder formulations is also my research interest."
In vitro drug delivery study using the next generation impactor (NGI), an artificial lung.