Mehmet Uzumcu, Chief Scientific and Technology Officer of Gilbert

Ever since graduating in Applied Physics from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Mehmet has been working in the field of Medical devices. During his studies he already touched upon medical physics and medical devices, and liked it so much that he pursued a PhD at the Cardiology and Radiology departments of Leiden University Medical Center. After obtaining his PhD, he worked at radiation therapy company Nucletron as a senior physicist and later in senior R&D and marketing positions. After that he joined Wassenburg Medical, one of the world leaders in cleaning and disinfection of flexible endoscopes. In his 5 years with Wassenburg Medical, he was on the Senior Management Team and responsible for the R&D department. Mehmet joined Gilbert in 2023 as Chief Scientific and Technology officer, with 25 years experience in medical devices.

How did Gilbert get to electrospray or EHDA?

ElectroHydrodynamic Atomization (EHDA) is a phenomenon known since the 16th century. It was described by William Gilbert for the very first time when he observed that droplets behaved in different ways under the influence of electric fields. So the phenomenon has long been known and for some years now applied in many ways, for example in mass spectrometry and for applying coatings and even in aerospace. Something as common as the Swiffer brush benefits from EHDA; the polymers on the Swiffer are made with electrospinning, which is also a form of EHDA.

About 15 years ago, people at TU Delft approached the Gilbert founders when investigating how EHDA could be applied to pulmonary delivery, leveraging EHDA’s ability to create monodispersed droplets, that is droplets more or less of the same size. The Gilbert team recognized the great potential for this unique aerosol technology to help address some of the challenges in delivery of drugs to the lungs. They found that EHDA is a great technology to make a monodispersed aerosol. Since then the Gilbert team has been working hard optimizing the technology for pulmonary drug delivery and developing expertise that is really pushing some of the boundaries of the EHDA domain.

What boundaries and challenges are you referring to?

Let me give you two examples, the first one about charged droplets. In almost all applications of EHDA, charged droplets are preferred. However, in our case we need neutralized droplets, because by neutralizing the droplets you take away their velocity and the aerosol becomes a mist. So mist, as I describe it, is tiny liquid droplets that float in the same place. We have close collaborations with some of the leaders in the scientific EHDA field, with whom we are working to quantify and further improve the efficiency of discharging. 

Another challenge we face is that for some pulmonary therapies, we need to aerosolize larger volumes, which would take a long time for administration with just a single nozzle or sprayhead. However, going from one to many nozzles destabilizes the electric field which affects the monodispersity of the droplets. To manage the electric field interactions across multiple nozzles to maintain a homogeneous electrical field for stable generation of our soft mist is very complex. But we overcame this challenge and demonstrated robust delivery step by step up to a large number of nozzles working simultaneously.