This is a study of drug delivery problems from hydrogels and it is mainly focused on the effects of the hydrogel's geometry on the behaviour of the release profile. Studying drug delivery also offers one the opportunity to delve into the physical mechanisms involved in the release process to better understand its theoretical implications. We can apply the well-developed theory of diffusion in order to understand many aspects of drug delivery. Thus, this thesis starts with a presentation of concepts and theories used in the following two articles (chapters). We go over the basic concept of drug delivery, followed by an introduction on diffusion. We then explain the ideas governing drug release and how we have modeled it. The tools used to generate our drug release platforms are presented followed by a discussion on characterizing the resulting drug release profiles.
This thesis is presented as a series of two articles that have been submitted to peer-reviewed scientific journals. The first article presents a novel combinatorial technique used to obtain controlled drug delivery profiles. We use an exact enumeration diffusion model in order to obtain our drug release profiles and test its validity by comparing these results with analytical theory and widely used empirical tools. By using a genetic algorithm, we then show that it is possible to tailor the drug delivery platform in order to get a specific functional form of the release profile.
The second article consists in testing two widely used empirical functions that are used in the literature to characterize drug release profiles. Several claims have been made regarding the interpretation of these functions and we have used our exact enumeration data to argue that although the functions fit the data relatively well on certain time scales, they do not necessarily convey reliable information about the mechanism of release.
Finally, we conclude with preliminary work that was done on a second optimization technique to be used in controlling drug delivery profiles. The Metropolis simulated annealing was used to further optimize the design of the drug release platform and was shown to be quite effective, albeit being computationally demanding.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/27817 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Casault, Sebastien |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 66 p. |
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