Category: Science

Gathering steam
Tobacco harm reduction took center stage at the recent Global Forum on Nicotine in Poland.
By Stefanie Rossel

The fourth annual Global Forum on Nicotine (GFN) took place in Warsaw, Poland, June 15–17. Under the theme “reducing harm, saving lives,” this year’s conference attracted 350 delegates from 54 countries. Attendees not only had the opportunity to listen to almost 50 lectures, but they could also study a variety of posters explaining the most recent research in the field of reduced-risk products.
The GFN is funded exclusively by registration fees, and it attracts a broad base of stakeholders involved with new and potentially safer nicotine products. Participants include academics, public health experts and parliamentarians, along with manufacturers and distributors. Consumers and consumer advocacy groups are involved as well.
The conference was preceded by ISoNTech, an international symposium on nicotine technology, which made its debut this year. Opened by Hon Lik, widely regarded as the inventor of the modern e-cigarette, it gave tobacco companies an opportunity to present research related to their nicotine delivery devices. Tobacco-heating products (THPs) featured prominently this year. Studies conducted by manufacturers suggest these devices deliver significantly lower levels of toxins than do combustible cigarettes.
The GNF was opened by Ethan Nadelmann, former director of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) in the United States. The DPA is a nonprofit organization that seeks to decriminalize responsible drug use and promotes harm reduction. In an emotional lecture, Nadelmann urged governments to learn from the mistakes in America’s war on drugs and cautioned against prohibitionist policies for smoke-free nicotine-delivery devices. The illegal market, he warned, would flourish.
Changing roles
The main part of the conference, divided into two tracks with partly parallel sessions, explored the changing roles of public health and manufacturers of reduced-risk products (RRPs) and looked at the conditions under which the interests of tobacco companies and public health might coincide. It also raised the question of whether the rules of engagement, regarding, for example, Article 5.3 of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which bans the tobacco industry from participating in tobacco control policy negotiations, needed to be changed now that tobacco companies have products that could benefit public health.
The question about the credibility of tobacco companies’ new research, given their past misuse of science, was partly answered in a presentation on the rapidly developing science on nicotine use. Comparing e-cigarettes, THPs and conventional cigarettes, Konstantinos Farsalinos, a cardiologist at the University of Patras in Greece, reached conclusions similar to those of Philip Morris International (PMI). In Farsalinos’ study, PMI’s iQOS delivered higher levels of nicotine to the aerosol than do e-cigarettes but lower levels than do conventional cigarettes.
The definition of combustion was hotly debated at the conference. A combustible cigarette burns at between 600 degrees and 950 degrees Celsius, according to Thomas McGrath, manager of RRPs at PMI. During the exothermic reaction that takes place inside the cigarette, the tobacco is burned to ash and generates smoke that contains more than 7,000 chemicals. THPs, by contrast, operate at considerably lower temperatures. According to McGrath, the temperature of the tobacco next to the heating element in iQOS reaches a maximum of approximately 300 Celsius—well below the temperature required for combustion, which exceeds 400 Celsius—while most of the tobacco is significantly below 250 Celsius. Contrary to combustible cigarettes, the temperature in iQOS decreases when air is being drawn through the device.
By now, several THPs are available on the market, but there is no standard way yet of assessing whether a product is heating rather than burning tobacco. To comprehensively assess this aspect, a team of British American Tobacco scientists has developed a five-step approach, which they introduced during the poster presentations.
The complex phenomenon of dual use of vaping products and combustible products was another focal point of the GFN. As dual use is a highly individual issue, existing data provide only limited insight. Tom Kirchner, clinical associate professor of public health, medicine and urban science at New York University, described a new model that shows the number of combustible cigarettes displaced by e-cigarettes and essentially is a categorizing or classifying approach.
Nicotine: just another culprit?
The conference demonstrated that the role nicotine plays in tobacco harm reduction for the time being will remain a matter of discussion. Neal Benowitz, professor at the University of California in San Francisco, acknowledged that his concerns about nicotine kept changing as new studies were released. Focusing on the question of whether physicians should recommend nicotine uptake in vaping, he stressed the pharmacological effects of nicotine, which he said include cardiovascular disease, reproductive toxicity, cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He concluded that short-term nicotine use posed little cardiovascular risk, whereas long-term use might be harmful.
While the focus currently is on delivering nicotine more safely, Eric C. Donny, from the department of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, argued that people should be pushed to positive behavior change by reducing nicotine in combustible smokes. While acknowledging that nicotine was not the direct cause of harm, he claimed that it sustained the use of a “vehicle” that was deadly. The availability of alternative nicotine-delivery devices might not be enough to rapidly reduce smoking, he noted; therefore policies were needed that minimized the appeal of cigarettes relative to RRPs. Reducing nicotine in combustibles and enabling the growth of RRPs, Donny said, might be synergistic, complementary approaches to ending smoking.
Snus ban challenged
The second track of the GFN dealt with policy, advocacy and practice. The EU’s longstanding ban on snus featured prominently in this session. Although snus gives a similar nicotine dose as does a combustible cigarette without presenting the same risks for cancer, the product is banned in all EU countries bar Sweden. Looking at 50 years of increasing snus use in Sweden, Lars Ramstrom of the Institute for Tobacco Studies in Sweden stated that patterns of dual use of combustible cigarettes had changed considerably over this period, with snus use gradually replacing smoking. Today, Sweden has a prevalence of daily smokers of 5 percent, by far the lowest in the EU, as well as the lowest tobacco-related mortality rate. If the EU allowed the sale and use of snus, 320,000 smoking-related deaths could be prevented each year, he calculated.
In July 2016, Swedish Match filed a legal challenge to overturn the EU snus ban. Even though its previous challenge, in 2003, failed, experts are optimistic about the outcome of the current case, given that there is now significantly more scientific evidence available to support snus’s harm reduction potential. In addition, because it has so far not been available on the EU market, snus could be claimed to be a novel tobacco product, for which the revised Tobacco Products Directive (TPD2) contains a regulatory path to market.
Unlike snus, e-cigarettes are available in a large number of markets. Nevertheless, electronic nicotine-delivery devices face many challenges as lawmakers struggle to decide the new technology’s place in society, as snapshots of various countries during the conference proved. E-cigarettes are technically illegal in Australia, where nicotine is classed as poison. In spite of restrictions, people are embracing vaping, and the sector has been growing. It remains legal in Australia to import nicotine liquids for personal use. In February 2017, the medicines regulator rejected an application to legalize nicotine-containing e-cigarettes, which leaves combustible cigarettes more accessible than a safer alternative.
New Zealand, which has similar legislation on vaping products, in March shifted its policy. Reflecting the general consensus that vaping is safer than smoking, the government plans to legalize e-cigarettes to help the country become smoke-free by 2025. While sales would be restricted to adults and vaping would be banned in nonsmoking areas, the vapor products would not be subject to tobacco taxation and plain packaging laws.
In Europe, the TPD2, which came into force in May 2016, has significantly changed the business environment for the vapor industry. In countries such as Poland and the U.K., researchers have witnessed the effects on public perception of negative coverage of the vapor industry in the mass media, which is often based on poorly designed and misleading studies.
Other issues tackled at the GFN included the availability of less hazardous tobacco products for certain groups in society, such as people with mental disorders, individuals with addiction issues and poor people (groups that tend to have high rates of smoking prevalence). As far as future regulation of novel nicotine products was concerned, conference speakers said that legislators should promote innovation, set standards on product safety, and give the tobacco and vapor industries appropriate marketing freedom to build new brands. Consumers, on the other hand, should get appropriate freedom to use those products, while they needed to be informed about the risk.
July 1, 2017
Vapor no bar to healing
Laboratory wound-healing assays have revealed that whereas cigarette smoke completely prevents wound healing at concentrations of more than 20 percent, electronic-cigarette vapor has no such effect, even at 100 percent concentration and double the amount of nicotine relative to that in smoke.
According to a British American Tobacco press note, the scratch tests involved growing in the laboratory a layer of endothelial cells (cells that line the inside of blood vessels), creating a wound/scratch in the layer of cells, and observing how long it took to heal.
It was found that the wound healed normally when exposed cells were untreated or when they were exposed to e-cigarette vapor, but not when exposed to cigarette smoke.
The results are published today in Toxicology Letters (DOI is 10.1016/j.toxlet.2017.06.001).
“Our results suggest that chemicals in cigarette smoke that inhibit wound healing are either absent from e-cigarette vapor or present in concentrations too low for us to detect an effect,” Dr. James Murphy, head of reduced risk substantiation at BAT was quoted as saying.
The press note went on to say that it was thought that the presence of damaged endothelial cells, which have an impaired ability to repair, might be a factor in the development of heart disease. Smoking was known to be a risk factor for the development of heart disease.
‘The basic steps of the test involve creating a wound in a single layer of cells grown in the lab, capturing images of the beginning and at regular intervals during the “healing” process, as the cells move together, and then comparing the images,’ the press note said.
‘In this way, it is possible to measure the ability of a tissue to repair an artificial injury in the presence of various substances. To repair the wound created by a scratch, cells must move into the wound and close the gap, and it’s the rate at which they do it that the test measures.
‘Scientists at British American Tobacco used the scratch test to compare the effects of smoke extract from a reference cigarette (3R4F) and vapor extract from two commercial e-cigarettes, Vype ePen (a closed modular device) and Vype eStick (a cig-a-like device), on the wound healing process.
‘When a person smokes or vapes, water-soluble chemicals pass into circulation and interact with endothelial cells lining blood vessels. So to mimic this exposure, the scientists tested aqueous extracts – the water-soluble fraction – of smoke or vapor. Aqueous extracts were obtained by bubbling puff-matched amounts of smoke or vapor through cell-growth medium to produce a stock that could be diluted into various concentrations. Smoke extract was then assessed at concentrations from 0 percent to 30 percent. To ensure that e-cigarette extracts were tested at equivalent and higher nicotine concentrations than smoke (as possibly experienced by a heavy vaper), vapor was tested at concentrations between 40 percent and 100 percent (over twice the nicotine).
‘Immediately after the wound was made, the cells were immersed in smoke or vapor extract for 20 hours. Smoke decreased cell migration rate in a concentration-dependent manner, completely inhibiting movement of cells towards the wound at concentrations over 20 percent. In stark contrast, vapor from both types of e-cigarette had no effect – cells could migrate into the wounded area, as normal, even at 100 percent concentration and double the amount of nicotine.’
June 26, 2017
Research under-appreciated
Dahlia Garwe
Zimbabwe’s government is failing to fund the country’s Tobacco Research Board (TRB) despite its being a key institution in the effort to turn around the fortunes of the country’s economy, according to a story in The News Day.
TRB general manager Dahlia Garwe last week told the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Agriculture, which was on tour, that 75 percent of the capital used to run the research institute came from their own commercial activities, mostly from seed production at Kutsaga.
“As a parastatal, we are supposed to get funding from the government, but we have not received anything and TRB has been self-supporting,” Garwe said.
“Government collects an 0.078 percent tobacco levy and it is shared by the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board (TIMB) and TRB, as well as other interested bodies, which contributes to about 30 percent to 35 percent of our revenue, while the 65 percent to 75 percent shortfall is borne by ourselves.”
Despite this lack of government support, the TRB had managed to produce tobacco seed varieties for the local and export market, and Kutsaga was said to be a very reputable seed research institute internationally.
Garwe said the TRB exported annually one and a half tons of Burley seed and 100 kg of flue-cured seed.
And the TRB currently has about 1,200 ha of seedlings that have been booked by farmers for planting in September. The seedlings are sold for $398 per ha.
The TRB management said it was facing challenges over raw materials that had to be ordered from outside Zimbabwe because, at times, it took six months for them to be delivered.
And it was facing problems because it needed to replace the equipment used in its laboratories. Some of this equipment had been used since the 1950s and when it broke down, it was difficult to get replacements because developed countries were now using modern equipment.
Garwe said other challenges included those associated with land, as well as those associated with illegal settlers, some of whom had invaded TRB space and were vandalizing fences and materials such as plastics used for growing tobacco seeds.
June 26, 2017
A burning question
British American Tobacco is due today to describe at a conference in Warsaw, Poland, how five criteria can be used to establish whether tobacco is being burnt or heated in a tobacco-heating product (THP).
The conference, the Global Forum on Nicotine, is being held at the Marriott Centrum Hotel, Warsaw, on June 15-17.
The main GFN program, which is scheduled for June 16 and 17, will examine the rapidly developing science in relation to nicotine use and the changing landscape, including policy responses and the influence of different stakeholders in this.
Whether tobacco is heated or burnt is important because it determines the chemical composition of the vapor produced. The very high temperatures at which cigarettes burn mean that there are more than 100 chemicals formed that are thought to be associated with the development of smoking-related diseases.
‘THPs are one of several new categories of product being designed as alternatives to conventional cigarettes – electronic cigarettes are a well-known example,’ BAT said in a pre-conference press note.
‘The burning zone in a cigarette can reach temperatures of between 600 and 950̊ºC, whereas in THPs, the temperature is hundreds of degrees lower. It is high enough to release nicotine and flavorings but not so high as to result in the burning of the tobacco and the creation of many of the very high temperature smoke toxicants thought to be involved in the development of the serious diseases associated with smoking. THPs therefore produce emissions that contain fewer toxicants and as a result have the potential to be significantly reduced risk compared to conventional cigarettes.’
BAT said that though various THPs were commercially available, they differed in the way they heated tobacco and in their temperature characteristics. And currently, there was no standard way of assessing whether a product was mainly heating rather than burning tobacco. So, scientists at BAT had developed a five-step approach to comprehensively assess this aspect of a THP.
“To ensure a THP is producing an aerosol by heating rather than burning tobacco, it is important to characterise the way the tobacco is heated,” Dr. Chuan Liu, head of THP science at BAT, was quoted as saying.
“Our five-step approach provides a comprehensive yet practical assessment irrespective of the heating mechanism in the device.”
The five steps are:
Step 1: ‘Measure any physical or chemical changes in the tobacco as it is heated all the way to cigarette combustion temperature to identify the safe temperature window for THP operation. In glo, British American Tobacco’s THP, the maximum heating temperature is set below 245ºC.
Step 2: ‘Establish the maximum temperature the tobacco is heated to and how long it is heated for when the THP is actually used…
Step 3: ‘Analyse the levels of the following combustion products: CO, CO₂, NO and NOx produced by the device when heating tobacco. These are key markers for tobacco that is heated to high temperatures or burnt. Their levels should be much lower than those found in the emissions of a reference cigarette.
Step 4: ‘Measure the level of emissions of a range of other known cigarette smoke toxicants potentially produced by the device. For example, some aldehydes are known to be formed by low-temperature decompositions of carbohydrates. Their levels can be used to judge the extent by which we control this low-temperature breakdown.
Step 5: ‘Examine the physical integrity of the tobacco rod after it has been heated in the device, to assess the extent of any degradation from heating to high temperatures or burning. No charring or ash should be formed.’
June 15, 2017
Hybrid device less risky
British American Tobacco has said that new laboratory data has revealed that vapor from its novel hybrid tobacco heating product (THP), iFuse, and two standard THPs produced little or no effect on human cells in biological testing.
“Our results suggest that these standard THPs and our novel hybrid product have the potential to reduce smoking-related disease risks when compared with cigarette smoking,” Dr. James Murphy, head of reduced risk substantiation at BAT was quoted as saying in a note posted on the company’s website.
“However, further pre-clinical and clinical research is required to substantiate conclusive risk reduction of these products.”
‘A series of lab-based biological studies were used to assess and compare the toxicological and biological effects of exposure to vapor from the hybrid iFuse, two different standard THPs, and smoke from a 3R4F reference cigarette,’ the note said. ‘The tests looked at the general health of the cells, mutations and damage to DNA, tumor promotion, oxidative stress and wound repair, all of which are involved in development of many smoking-related diseases.
‘Results show that cigarette smoke tested positive on all counts, whereas the hybrid and standard THPs did not cause mutations or damage to DNA, and showed considerably reduced responses in the other tests. ‘Overall, the novel hybrid tobacco heating product had the least effect, showing little to no biological activity in any of the assays in which it was tested.’
The results are published today in the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology (DOI: 10.1016/j.fct.2017.05.023).
‘The hybrid device, iFuse, combines the workings of an e-cigarette with a pod containing tobacco,’ the note said. ‘An e-liquid is heated to produce an aerosol that passes through the tobacco pod. The aerosol cools from around 35°C to 32°C as it passes over the tobacco, heating up the pod sufficiently to extract flavor without any direct heating of the tobacco.
‘This device operates at a very different temperature to standard THPs: THPs generally heat tobacco to between 240°C and 350°C, whereas the hybrid product heats tobacco to around 34°C.
‘These temperatures are not high enough to burn the tobacco and the resulting vapors contain far fewer and lower levels of toxicants than cigarette smoke, which can reach temperatures of over 900°C during puffing (http://ow.ly/1mag30cbv3x). The vapour produced by iFuse is similar to that produced by Vype ePen.’
BAT said that Vype ePen had been shown to have significantly reduced levels of toxicants in its vapor and that the current expert estimate was that using e-cigarettes was about 95 percent safer than was smoking cigarettes.
June 5, 2017
Nanoparticles lower toxicity
Chemists at the Johannes Gutenberg University (JGU) in Mainz, Germany, have developed a technique that reduces the toxic effects of commercially available cigarettes, according to a story at physorg.com.
‘Tobacco smoke contains almost 12,000 different constituents,’ the story said. ‘Among these are narcotoxic substances such as nicotine, blood toxins like cyanide and carbon monoxide, not to mention the various carcinogens. Among these are free oxygen radicals, also known as reactive oxygen species. More than 10 quadrillion (10¹⁶) of these molecules are inhaled with every puff on a cigarette.’
The Mainz-based team headed by Professor Wolfgang Tremel said that it had discovered how to lower significantly the levels of these free oxygen radicals and thus markedly reduce the toxicity of cigarette smoke.
Researchers took the underlying idea behind the concept from natural enzymes. In the presence of an enhanced concentration of reactive oxygen species as a result of, for instance, tobacco smoke, uncontrolled cell division and oxidative cell damage can occur. Nature regulates the concentration of radicals by means of antioxidant enzymes such as superoxide dismutase (SOD), which plays a central role in the prevention of pathological processes. The naturally occurring enzyme utilizes metals such as copper-zinc, nickel, iron, and manganese as reactive centers that cause oxygen radicals to decompose so that the organism is protected from their aggressive reactive behavior.
The story said the team of chemists in Mainz had been collaborating with a group headed by Professor Jürgen Brieger of the Mainz University Medical Center to determine whether it were possible to integrate functionalized copper hydroxide nanoparticles in cigarette filters and thus reduce levels of free radicals in smoke, hence providing smokers with greater protection against their toxic potential.
Cytotoxicity tests had shown that the cigarette smoke extracts in examined concentrations no longer had a toxic effect on human cells after passing through cigarette filters containing nanoparticles, while there had been increased toxicity in the case of controls in which untreated filters were employed.
The researchers in Mainz had thus been able to demonstrate that imitating natural defense mechanisms with the help of nanoparticles was possible and that a reduction in the toxic effects of various types of smoke could be achieved.
The researchers’ report was published in the scientific journal Nanoscale.
The physorg.com story is at: https://phys.org/news/2017-05-copper-hydroxide-nanoparticles-toxic-oxygen.html
May 30, 2017
Vapor trial
Chemical analysis has revealed no detectable difference between the vapors produced by an electronic cigarette (Vype ePen) and a novel hybrid device containing tobacco (iFuse), according to a British American Tobacco press note.
‘Previous research revealed that the levels of nearly all tested toxicants in Vype ePen vapor are much lower than in cigarette smoke,’ the note said.
‘The Royal College of Physicians is among those who say that smokers should switch to e-cigarettes to reduce harm and help them quit smoking. However, some consumers say that they want more tobacco taste.’
To remedy this, researchers at BAT have created a hybrid device, iFuse, that combines the workings of an e-cigarette with a tobacco component. This device heats tobacco rather than burns it.
‘An e-liquid is heated and a vapor is produced that passes through a pod containing tobacco,’ said BAT. ‘Although the tobacco is only gently heated (around 35ºC) by the vapor, this is sufficient to release the tobacco flavour. Consumer testing revealed that this produces a great tasting vapor.
‘Analysing the general vapor composition using non-targeted chemical screening, the scientists could find no significant difference between the vapors generated by the novel hybrid tobacco product and the tobacco-free control product (Vype ePen).’
BAT said also that the iFuse vapor had been assessed for some known cigarette smoke toxicants and substances formed by electronic vaping products, and compared to the control Vype ePen, a reference cigarette (Kentucky 3R4F) and air blanks.
‘Of the 113 compounds tested, only 26 were quantified in the vapor from the hybrid tobacco product,’ the press note said. ‘The classes and levels of toxicants generated by the hybrid tobacco product were similar to those from the control e-cigarette, Vype ePen, and were 92 to >99 percent lower on a per-puff basis than those in smoke from the reference cigarette. Many of the analytes quantified in the hybrid tobacco product vapor were at levels comparable to those in air blanks.’
Dr. James Murphy, head of reduced risk substantiation at BAT was quoted as saying that, overall, the novel hybrid tobacco product provided a great tobacco flavor but maintained a toxicant profile similar to that of Vype ePen with significantly lower levels of some key toxicants compared to cigarette smoke.
The results were published in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicity (DOI: 10.1016/j.fct.2017.05.022)).
May 29, 2017
FDA starts iQOS review
Philip Morris said yesterday that the US Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products had initiated a substantive scientific review process in respect of its electronically heated tobacco product (EHTP), iQOS.
On May 24, the FDA had published the executive summary and research summaries supporting PMI’s Modified Risk Tobacco Product (MRTP) application for its EHTP, the company said in a note posted on its website.
‘In doing so, the agency announced that it will publish a notice in the Federal Register establishing a formal docket for public comments on PMI’s application at a later date,’ it said.
‘PMI submitted the application to the FDA on December 5, 2016.
‘Publication of PMI’s summaries initiates a substantive scientific review process by the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products.’
PMI said the FDA had made the application summaries publicly available and that the agency would publish additional modules of PMI’s MRTP application on a rolling basis.
The FDA had established a one-year timetable for reviewing MRTP applications, though that timing was non-binding.
“We welcome FDA and public review of the comprehensive scientific evidence package that we submitted to the agency through its MRTP application process,” said Dr. Moira Gilchrist, PMI vice president corporate affairs of reduced-risk products.
“PMI’s application demonstrates our commitment to develop innovative, smoke-free technologies that can ultimately replace combustible cigarettes to the benefit of smokers, public health and society at large.”
Meanwhile, the Altria Group said that it was pleased that the FDA had filed PMI’s MRTP application.
It said that upon regulatory authorization by the FDA of PMI’s Premarket Tobacco Product application (PMTA), Philip Morris USA, an Altria company, would have an exclusive license to sell the electronically-heated tobacco product in the US.
PMI submitted the PMTA to the agency on March 31, 2017.
“PM USA is actively working on commercialization plans and we look forward to bringing this electronically-heated product to the US market,” said Sarah Knakmuhs, vice president heated tobacco products, PM USA.
“We are excited about the opportunity to add this product to our portfolio for adult tobacco consumers who are looking for an alternative to conventional cigarettes.”
May 26, 2017
IQOS safety questioned
A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine reports that output from the Philip Morris International heat-not-burn product, iQOS, contains the same harmful components as are found in conventional tobacco cigarette smoke, according to a healio.com story relayed by the TMA.
Writing in the current publication, Dr. Reto Auer, of the Institute of Primary Health Care at the University of Bern in Switzerland, said PMI claimed that iQOS released no smoke because the tobacco did not combust and the tobacco leaves were only heated not burned. ‘However, there can be smoke without fire,’ he said.
‘The harmful components of tobacco cigarette smoke are products of incomplete combustion (pyrolysis) and the degradation of tobacco cigarettes through heat (thermogenic degradation).’
Auer and his colleagues analyzed and compared the contents and toxic compounds released in iQOS (iQOS Holder, iQOS Pocket Charger, Marlboro HeatSticks [regular], and Heets, Philip Morris SA) ‘smoke’ with that of conventional cigarettes (Lucky Strike Blue Lights).
Their study was said to have found that iQOS smoke contained similar levels of volatile organic compounds and nicotine as the smoke from conventional cigarettes, and that heat-not-burn products released higher levels of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon acenaphthene than did conventional cigarettes.
The researchers called for further evaluation of the health effects of iQOS and recommended that heated tobacco products should be subjected to the same indoor-smoking bans as were conventional tobacco cigarettes.
May 25, 2017
Deadline extended
CORESTA has extended by a week the deadline for the submission of abstracts of papers intended for presentation at its 2017 Joint Study Group meetings.
The deadline is now May 26.
The Smoke Science and Product Technology (SSPT) meeting is due to be held at Kitzbühel, Austria, on October 8-12.
And the Agronomy & Leaf Integrity and Phytopathology & Genetics meeting is scheduled to be held at Santa Cruz do Sul, Brazil, on October 22-26.
The invitation for abstract submissions is being made through the CORESTA website at www.coresta.org.
SSPT abstracts can be submitted directly at: www.sspt2017.org.
CORESTA said that authors would receive immediately an e-mail message confirming the successful submission of their abstracts.
They would be informed of the CORESTA Reading Committee’s selection towards the end of June.
May 24, 2017