Applied Drug Delivery Throughout the Engineering Curriculum

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Drug Delivery is a burgeoning field that represents one of the major research and development focus areas of the pharmaceutical industry today, with new drug delivery system sales exceeding 10 billion dollars per year. 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, this project is developing and integrating applied drug delivery coursework and experiments throughout the Rowan Engineering curriculum. The design and production of new drug delivery systems requires that the engineer fully understand the drug and know material properties related to the processing variables that affect the release of the drug. This requires the engineer to have 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. This project provides the Chemical Engineering students at Rowan University with the necessary foundation materials and fundamental principles. There are seven modules adapted, implemented and used to introduce students to the multidisciplinary engineering principles of common drug delivery systems designs. Each module describes experiments used to support the design, preparation, characterization, and analysis of that particular drug delivery system. The seven drug delivery systems explored are: tablets, ointments, membrane systems, microcapsules, osmotic pumps, Chemical kinetics, and supercritical fluid-processed particles. The engineering goals of this project are:--to explore different types of drug delivery systems--to study drug delivery designs in a quantitative manner using engineering principles--to use up-to-date industrial techniques for the production, testing, and analysis of drug delivery systems and to evaluate factors influencing the release of drug from a delivery system.To accomplish these goals, this collaborative project maximizes the curricular impact by vertically integrating the seven modules beginning with the Freshman Clinic, followed by the fundamental engineering courses, the Junior-Senior research projects course, and finally, advanced level elective courses on pharmaceutical topics. These modules employ proven methods in SMET education. To maintain the quality , recurring meetings of senior project personnel and other Chemical Engineering Department faculty are planned as necessary. The project is undertaking both formative evaluations and summative evaluations, and its dissemination is being accomplished through presentations at national conferences, CD-ROM and refereed journals. Keywords: Drug delivery systems, drug delivery methods, pharmaceutical drug delivery systems