I-Corps: All-in-One Virtual Human Testing Platform for Inhalation

I-Corps项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是开发一个虚拟平台，用于设计和测试人类医疗应用的吸入器。 所提出的技术旨在模拟气流和从健康和患病肺部中的各种类型的吸入器发出的雾化药物的吸入，以及药物转移到人体的其他部位。 目前，无效的治疗结果导致3.65亿患者由于向小气道的药物输送效率低而患有肺部疾病。 有助于开发更有效的吸入器的技术可能有助于实现更好的药物输送和治疗效果。 所提出的平台可用于量化气流和从吸入器排放到人体呼吸系统中的雾化药物的递送剂量，以及药物在全身中的移位。拟议的平台可以节省66%的成本和90%的吸入器开发和批准时间，加速肺部医疗研究和需要吸入器的新疗法的开发。I-Corps的这一项目是基于开发一个软件平台来模拟气流和从各种类型的吸入器中吸入雾化药物。 拟议的技术是一个基于网络的用户界面和云计算平台，可用于评估吸入器性能和生物等效性。 拟议的平台使用特定疾病的全肺模型来了解吸入器如何在特定疾病和特定患者的肺部环境中提供准确的剂量。 此外，它可用于评估肺部疾病如何改变肺部弹性和气道形态以影响药物沉积，并提供高分辨率数据以增强对疾病状况、吸入器设计和药物制剂如何影响肺部疾病治疗指定肺部部位的药物递送效率的基本理解。 使用该平台对新吸入装置性能进行评估可能会加速吸入器创新和新产品治疗肺部疾病的监管审批过程，并推动吸入器创新超越现有计算肺模型的成就。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a virtual platform to design and test inhalers for human medical applications. The proposed technology is designed to simulate airflow and the inhalation of aerosolized medication emitted from various types of inhalers in both healthy and diseased lungs, as well as drug translocation to other parts of the human body. Currently, ineffective therapeutic outcomes cause 365 million patients to suffer from lung diseases due to low medication delivery efficiency to small airways. Technology to aid in the development of more effective inhalers may help to achieve better drug delivery and therapeutic outcomes. The proposed platform may be used to quantify airflow and the delivered dose of aerosolized medication emitted from inhalers into human respiratory systems, as well as the translocation of medications in the whole body. The proposed platform may save 66% of the cost and 90% of the time for inhaler development and approval, accelerating pulmonary healthcare research and the development of new therapeutics that require inhalers. This may improve pulmonary health and quality of life for patients with lung diseases.This I-Corps project is based on the development of a software platform to simulate airflow and the inhalation of aerosolized medication emitted from various types of inhalers. The proposed technology is a web-based user interface and cloud-computing platform that may be used to evaluate inhaler performance and bioequivalence. The proposed platform uses disease-specific whole-lung models to understand how inhalers deliver accurate doses in disease-specific and patient-specific lung environments. In addition, it may be used to evaluate how lung disease can change lung elasticities and airway morphologies to affect drug deposition, and provide high-resolution data to enhance the fundamental understanding of how disease conditions, inhaler design, and drug formulation can influence drug delivery efficiency to designated lung sites for lung disease treatments. Evaluation of new inhalation device performance using this platform may accelerate the process of inhaler innovation and regulatory approval of new products to treat pulmonary diseases as well as advance inhaler innovation beyond what existing computational lung models have achieved.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.