Applied Drug Delivery
(NSF)
Drug Delivery is a burgeoning field that represents one of the major
research and development focus areas of pharmaceutical industry today,
with new drug delivery system sales exceeding 10 billion dollars per
year [[i]].
Chemical Engineers play an important and expanding role in this
exciting field, yet undergraduate chemical engineering students are
rarely exposed to drug delivery through their coursework. To provide
students with the skills directly relevant to the evolving needs of
the pharmaceutical industry, we are developing seven modules that
introduce engineering students drug delivery systems.
To design and produce a new drug delivery system, an engineer must
fully understand the drug and material properties and the processing
variables that affect the release of the drug from the system. This
requires a solid grasp of the fundamentals of mass transfer, reaction
kinetics, thermodynamics and transport phenomena. He or she must also
be skilled in characterization techniques and physical property
testing of the delivery system, and practiced in the analysis of the
drug release data.
We are developing experiments and educational materials for the
design, preparation, characterization, and analysis of drug delivery
systems. A variety of drug delivery systems are explored:
tablets, ointments, membrane systems, microcapsules, osmotic pumps,
and supercritical fluid-processed particles.
[i]
Langer, R., Foreward to Encyclopedia of Controlled Drug
Delivery, Volume 1, Edith Mathiowitz (ed.), John Wiley and
Sons, NY 1999.
