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，设计和测试用于人类医疗应用的吸入器。所提出的技术旨在模拟健康和患病肺部中各种吸入器发出的气流和雾化药物的吸入，以及药物转运到人体其他部位的情况。目前，由于小气道给药效率低，治疗效果不佳，导致3.65亿患者患有肺部疾病。帮助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从吸入器释放到人体呼吸系统的气流和雾化药物的递送剂量，以及药物在全身的移位。拟议的平台可为吸入器的开发和批准节省66%的成本和90%的时间，从而加速肺部保健研究和需要吸入器的新疗法的开发。这可能会改善肺部疾病患者的肺部健康和生活质量。这个I-Corps项目是基于开发一个软件平台来模拟气流和吸入从各种类型的吸入器发出的雾化药物。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。提出的平台使用疾病特异性全肺模型来了解吸入器如何在疾病特异性和患者特异性肺环境中提供准确剂量。此外，它可用于评估肺部疾病如何改变肺弹性和气道形态，从而影响药物沉积，并提供高分辨率数据，以增强对疾病状况、吸入器设计和药物配方如何影响药物递送效率的基本理解，从而用于肺部疾病治疗。使用该平台评估新吸入装置的性能可能会加速吸入器创新和监管部门批准治疗肺部疾病的新产品的过程，并推动吸入器创新超越现有计算肺模型所实现的水平。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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.