Computer Aided Design of Drug Delivery Systems

The drug and pharmaceutical industry is a multi-billion dollar business that spends billions of dollars every year trying to optimize drugs and the way they are delivered to the body. Researchers and drug companies alike are mostly concerned with both the quantity and duration of drug presence in the body. Formulating new technologies and delivery mechanisms is a very cumbersome process that can take more time and money than is desirable. In order to arrive to improved and more efficient drug delivery mechanisms, faster and cheaper, the use of computer aided design for drug delivery systems can be utilized for the optimization of drug delivery. This involves simplifying the geometry and physics of certain drug delivery proposals, and solving equations that explain the simplified physics using computer software. The focus of this research was to use computer aided design to model certain drug delivery scenarios, with the goal in mind to optimize these drug delivery systems and their mechanisms. Our computer models can provide insight into the different mechanisms involved, and help find the different variables that can be altered for more desirable drug delivery systems. For this research, fundamental mathematical equations of transfer processes, relying heavily on mass transfer principles, between the drug delivery system and mediums were formulated. Initial conditions for the drug delivery system and their appropriate mass transfer principles were put into COMSOL Multiphysics; the software was primarily used to set up and solve our computer models. Once our computer models were designed and ready, different simulations were run changing specific variables in order to best observe how certain variables can affect a drug delivery system. These models can be used later to optimize current drug delivery systems. 1