Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology group's first in-person meeting

Our research group was formally launched during the assembly restriction period due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and thus larger gatherings had to be postponed for the safety of the team and the society. We have had frequent virtual events and we have gotten to know each other during the numerous online meetings. But nothing beats the smoothness and productivity of face-to-face communication for exchange of ideas and planning for future research projects. And naturally the vital recreational activities for building the team cohesion.

As the corona situation allowed, Prof. Timo Laaksonen organized the first ever joint live seminar of our University of Helsinki and Tampere University research groups in beautiful surroundings of Hyvinkää. Here is how he commented after the very successful event:

Our group marked the end of one period of the corona era with the first in-person seminar since early 2020. Since it had been such a long time, we made it count and got together both the Chemistry group in Tampere and Pharmaceutics team in Helsinki. All in all, 19 researchers gathered on 21.-22.10. in Sveitsi, Hyvinkää for some nice discussions and presentations about our people, projects, open access publishing, and the most important collaborators. Not to forget dinner with people who we had not seen together in one place during the whole pandemic.

We had the pleasure of having several interesting presentations by invited speakers: Robert Luxenhofer talked about new kinds of polymers for ultra-high drug-loaded formulations, Tomi Rantamäki gave a presentation on antidepressant effects and the sleep-wake cycle, and Clare Strachan gave a nice overview of non-linear techniques in pharmaceutical analysis and the new qCSI infrastructure. Finally, Veikko Linko who could join us in person from Aalto University talked about DNA-origami for biomedical applications. We thank all the speakers for the excellent presentations!

I am not sure where else you could have heard about the synthesis of chromophores, light-triggered liposome, and extracellular vesicles in one day while establishing where the Peter Gabriel divide runs in the group. I was very happy to see the diversity of our research and the enthusiasm of all our researchers. It was great to finally have everyone together. We will definitely organize this again next year, in the second annual pharmacy-chemistry meeting!

Indeed, couldn’t said it any better. In addition to the scientific output, the first live seminar allowed us to take profile photos of all of our members. The team also drew illustrations depicting their work. Please go and see our group members on our updated ‘People page ’.

See you next time (in-person)!

Ps. For those interested, the Peter Gabriel divide seems to run roughly between the Post Docs and the senior scientists.