The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) has selected the research work carried out by a team led by Dr Bhupinder Singh Bhoop, Professor at University Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (UIPS), Panjab University, Chandigarh as exemplary for awarding in the domain of “Drug Delivery Development using Quality by Design (QbD)” at the Annual Meeting of the AAPS to be held at Chicago, USA.

 The AAPS Quality-by-Design (QbD) and Product Performance focus group will present an award to promote the group's goals to leverage, advance, and accelerate science- and risk-based approaches and technologies and develop strategies that link the critical quality attributes, product, process, and patient throughout the product life cycle.

The award comes as recognition of the efforts of the research group in developing an integrated and multidisciplinary approach for advancing pharmaceutical product quality for the benefits of patient community on his work, “QbD-based Development of “Optimized” Mucoadhesive Formulations of Rivastigmine with Enhanced Bioavailability Potential”. The said Graduate Student Award from AAPS, along with a commemorative plaque and a monetary award of $500 will be received by Dr Rishi Kapil who has just completed his Ph D on the said research work under the supervision of Professor Bhoop at the annual AAPS Meeting on October 16 , 2012.

Prof Bhoop is considered a pioneer in establishing the concept of Formulation by Design (FbD) for systematically developing optimized drug delivery products encompassing the use of experimental designs and QbD. Working in the domain of FbD since the past two decades, he has to his credit around 151 publications, out of which more than 65 are dedicated exclusively on FbD, with Scopus H-Index of 16, and cumulative impact factor of 140. Plus, he has been instrumental in having four patents and two tech transfers on FbD optimized nano-structured drug products.

A widely travelled scientist, Dr Bhoop has shared his expertise on FbD at several prestigious academic, research and industrial forums in India, USA, Canada, China and Germany through a total of 157 invited, plenary and keynote lectures. He is on the editorial board of over a score of prestigious peer-reviewed journals.The present award comes as a sequel to several other accolades bagged by him and his team.

Currently, he is also the Honorary Co-ordinator of UGC-Centre of Excellence on Nanomaterials, Nanoparticles and Applications, and Honorary Co-ordinator of UGC-Centre of Advanced Studies in Pharmaceutical Sciences at Panjab University.