Participants in the Pharmacy symposium organised by the Department of Pharmacy last week at St Vincent de Paul Residence (SVPR) were addressed by Dr Philip Micallef, general manager of Amino Chemicals, and by Dr Luciana Malpezzi from the Milan Polytechnic.

Dr Micallef spoke about the close collaboration between the Department of Pharmacy and Amino Chemicals on pharmacy education and how it is planned to expand this relationship to incorporate significant research projects.

Dr Malpezzi described the excellent placement that one of the Maltese pharmacy students carried out at the University of Milan. She dwelt on the use of X-ray crystallography in the identification of the various crystal forms and of the importance of such determinations to the pharmaceutical research.

This formed the basis of the project which was presented by Neville Grech, during this year's pharmacy symposium. Mr Grech's project dealt with the "Formation and physiochemical characterisation of polymorphs of active pharmaceutical ingredients".

Other students presenting projects related to the pharmaceutical industry were Christopher Mamo who worked in association with Starpharma on the "Setting up of a training manual for process operators", Ismael Dalli worked with Actavis on "Validation of cleaning procedures in the pharmaceutical industry using microbial parameters", Audrey Sultana worked on a project with Arrow on the "Validation of a new pharmaceutical manufacturing site" while Yakof Azzopardi presented a project on "Establishing a system for DNA determination", which he carried out with the assistance of the Malta National Laboratory.

The symposium was closed by Chantelle Ellul, vice-president of the Malta Pharmaceutical Student Association, who congratulated the students for the excellent presentations and thanked the Head of Department, Professor Anthony Serracino Inglott and all the staff at the Pharmacy Department, for their constant support.