Affiliations 

  • 1 Faculty of Ocean Engineering Technology & Informatics, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, Kuala Nerus 21030, Malaysia
  • 2 Department of Pharmaceutics, College of Pharmacy, Jouf University, Sakaka 72388, Saudi Arabia
  • 3 Centre of Drug Delivery Research, Faculty of Pharmacy, University Kebangsaan Malaysia, Jalan Raja Muda Abdul Aziz, Kuala Lumpur 50300, Malaysia
Polymers (Basel), 2020 Dec 05;12(12).
PMID: 33291495 DOI: 10.3390/polym12122921

Abstract

Various swelling drug delivery devices are promising materials for control drug delivery because of their ability to swell and release entrapped therapeutics, in response to physiological stimuli. Previously, many mathematical models have been developed to predict the mechanism of drug release from a swelling device. However, some of these models do not consider the changes in diffusion behaviour as the device swells. Therefore, we used a two-phase approach to simplify the mathematical model considering the effect of swelling on the diffusion coefficient. We began by defining a moving boundary problem to consider the swelling process. Landau transformation was used for mitigating the moving boundary problem. The transformed problem was analytically solved using the separation of variables method. Further, the analytical solution was extended to include the drug release in two phases where each phase has distinct diffusion coefficient and continuity condition was applied. The newly developed model was validated by the experimental data of bacterial cellulose hydrogels using the LSQCURVEFIT function in MATLAB. The numerical test showed that the new model exhibited notable improvement in curve fitting, and it was observed that the initial effective diffusion coefficient of the swelling device was lower than the later effective diffusion coefficient.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.