It has been shown that prolonged systemic presence of a drug can cause a build up of that drug in the skin. This drug ‘reservoir’, if properly understood, could provide useful and important information about the recent drug-taking history of a patient. In this thesis we create three mathematical models which combine to explore the potential for a drug reservoir to form in the skin and be collected as a method of monitoring compliance. The first model is used to characterise timedependent drug concentrations in plasma and tissue following a customisable drug regimen. Outputs from this model provide boundary conditions for the second, spatio-temporal model of drug build-up and concentration profile in the skin. This then provides initial conditions for the final model which predicts the extraction. These models are then used to identify the scenarios which have the greatest potential for successfully monitoring patient compliance via the skin. We focus in particular on drugs that are highly bound as this will restrict their potential to move freely into the skin but which are lipophilic so that, in the unbound form, they would demonstrate an affinity to the outer layers of the skin (which are built around a lipid matrix). We highlight how this study might be used to inform future experimental design and data collection in order to provide relevant parameter estimates for reservoir formation and its potential to contribute to enhanced drug monitoring techniques.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:723342 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Jones, Jennifer |
| Contributors | White, Katrin ; Delgado-Charro, Maria ; Guy, Richard |
| Publisher | University of Bath |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0019 seconds