The proposed 3-day NYAS-sponsored conference will bring together, for the first, time, chemical, electrical and biomedical engineers, pharmacologists, pharmaceutical scientists and chronobiologists to discuss the reasons for the development of drug delivery systems that can automatically administer temporally-optimized patterns of a single drug, multiple drugs or genetically-engineered protein molecules. The purpose of this meeting is ultimately to stimulate the development of safer and more effective therapies for a wide range of disorders by considering administration timing or patterning in time. The meeting will include 8 major lectures covering essential topics in depth and about 30 other talks between 10 and 20 minutes in length. A poster session (50 posters) for the first of 3 evenings will serve to get participants communicating freely early in the conference. Posters will be displayed throughout the meeting to serve as a focus for interaction and communication. The six scientific sessions will, respectively: relate the physiologic need for pulsatile delivery of hormones and the need for retrieval of medical information present within high frequency cardiovascular rhythms; the afternoon will detail the importance of circadian physiology and will focus upon the development of circadian-based drug delivery systems; on day 2 the necessity for circadian-based delivery of cancer treatments will be followed by an afternoon devoted to drug carriers, chemical-physical aspects of drug delivery and how these systems can be temporarily controlled; the morning of the third day will discuss the temporal coordination of mechanical and computerized electronic delivery systems; the meeting is to be concluded by a panel discussion which focuses upon clinical study designs required for elucidation of optimal temporal delivery patterns, successful drug-specific chronotherapies, device-based time-qualified treatments; finally, regulatory implications of the development of time-specified therapeutic preparations will be considered.
