The article entitled: "3D printed oral solid dosage forms containing hydrochlorothiazide for controlled drug delivery" by Gioumouxouzis, C. I., Katsamenis, O. L., Bouropoulos, N., & Fatouros, D. G. to have been selected by the Journal of Drug Delivery Science and Technology as the "Most outstanding JDDST research article in 2017".

The award was announced in public at the 11^th World Meeting on Pharmaceutics, Biopharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology, held on 19 -22 March 2018 in Granada.

Abstract: 3D printing has been recently employed in the design and fabrication of medicine, aiming to improve their properties and release behavior. In the current work an oral solid dosage formwas created by Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), using a custom built filament comprised of a water soluble polymer polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), mannitol and hydrochlorothiazide(HCTZ) as model drug and further co-formulated via Hot-Melt Extrusion (HME). This composition was printed as the inner part of a three-compartment hollow cylinder dosage form using a dual extrusion 3D FDM printer, whereas the outer parts of the formulation consisted of water-insoluble polylactic acid (PLA). The produced formulations were characterized by means of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Release studies were performed in pH 1.2 and 6.8 whereas time-lapsed X-ray microfocus Computed Tomography (4D-CT), was employed to visualize volumetric and morphological changes of the formulations during the dissolution procedure. The results showed that HCTZ was incorporated in the amorphous state. Dissolution studies demonstrated that HCTZ exhibited zero-order kinetics whereas 4D-CT revealed a bi-directional smooth and homogenous reduction of PVA further corroborating the dissolution studies. The results showed that FDM printing might be used to ‘fine tune’ the release of drug molecules.

According to the classification of Professor. Ioannides (https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/john-ioannidis) concerning Scientists with Greek names that have the greatest influence in the International Bibliography, three faculty members of the Department of Materials Science, Mr. Joseph Galanakis, Mr. Basil Georgakilas and Mr. Michael Sigalas are in the list.

In his first annual lecture, in memory of Professor Dimitris Trichopoulos, on “The exodus of Greek scientists – a meta-analysis,” Ioannidis presented statistics on the 672 scientists of Greek origin, who have had the greatest influence in the international scientific field, based on objective data retrieved from the Google Scholar database. On average, the 672 Greek scientists have been referenced around 17,000 times in various international scientific reports and almost all of them live outside of Greece.

The oldest Greek scientist is Aristotle, who is still referenced in modern scientific literature.

Out of the 672 leading Greek scientists, only 95 (14%) are located in Greece. More than half (376 scientists or 56%) live in the US, another 60 live in the United Kingdom, 32 in Canada, 24 in Germany, 20 in France, 19 in Switzerland, 17 in Australia, 9 in Cyprus and 21 are located in other countries across the world.

According to the findings, 33 leading Greek scientists have passed away while 12 – including Dimitris Trichopoulos- were born abroad to Greek families who had emigrated. The rest migrated later in their lives.

The PhD Candidate of the Department of Materials Science of the University of Patras and fellow of The Institute of Chemical Engineering Sciences (ICE-HT), Ms. Penelope Angelopoulou, with the supervision of Ass. Prof. George Avgouropoulos was evaluated by an international scientific committee and won the first prize "Young Researcher Award" in the international conference "13th international conference on Nanosciences & Nanotechnologies" for her work entitled "Combustion-synthesized LiMn-based spinel nanostructures as cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries".

The postgraduate student of our Department, Mr. E. C. Senis won the best oral presentation award for young scientists in XXXI Panhellenic Conference on Solid State Physics and Materials Science held in Thessaloniki, Greece, September 20-23, 2015 for the paper entitled "The impact of grain size/interface at Boron Carbide/epoxy composites: dielectric properties and molecular dynamics".