Victoria Kett

Dr. Kett is a member of the Drug Delivery Research Group. Her research interests lie in the development and characterisation of freeze-dried (lyophilised) formats. Examples of these include

• freeze-dried tablets for mucosal (nasal, sublingual and vaginal) administration of material including HIV vaccine and microbicides.
  
• freeze-dried/spray freeze-dried liposomes for nasal/pulmonary delivery.
• freeze-dried nanoparticles for delivery to the eye

More fundamental research includes investigation into the mechanisms of protein protection during freeze-drying using thermal analysis techniques (DSC, MTDSC and isothermal microcalorimetry) as well as neutron scattering in collaboration with colleagues at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

She has also worked extensively in the use of thermal techniques to characterise amorphous systems and the detection of polymorphic transitions.

Dr. Kett was involved in the foundation of the Clinical Raman microscopy unit together with colleagues from the schools of chemistry and Medicine, Dentistry & Biomedical Science and has published on the use of this technique for the identification of polymorphic changes in pharmaceutical systems.
In 2002 she was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry Thermal Methods Group Cyril Keattch award for “The Application of Thermoanalytical Techniques to the Study of the Freeze Drying Process”.