An In Silico Investigation of a Lobe-Specific Targeted Pulmonary Drug Delivery Method

Nowadays, “personalized medicine” is starting to replace the current “one size fits all” approach. The goal is to have the right drug with the right dose for the right patient at the right time and location. Indeed, conventional pulmonary drug delivery devices still have poor efficiencies (<25%) for delivering drugs to the lung tumor sites. Major portions of the aggressive medicine deposit on healthy tissue, which causes severe side effects and induces extra health care expenses. Therefore, a new targeted pulmonary drug delivery method is proposed and evaluated using the Computational Fluid-Particle Dynamics (CFPD) method to achieve the lobe-specific delivery. By controlling the release position and velocity of the drug particles at the mouth inlet, drug deposition efficiency (DE) in a designated lobe can be increased up to 90%. Intersubject variability has also been investigated using the noninvasive in silico tool. Results indicate that the glottis constriction ratio is a key factor to influence the effectiveness of the purposed targeted drug delivery method. Although lobe-specific pulmonary drug delivery can be realized, the actuation flow rate must be lower than 2 L/min, and the glottis constriction ratio has a significant impact on the effectiveness of the targeting method. Also, a design idea using e-cigarette as the prototype is proposed as the next-generation inhaler to accommodate the operational flexibility restrictions.