Drug delivery experiments in the ChE curriculum

Drug Delivery is a burgeoning field that represents one of the major research and development focus areas of pharmaceutical industry today, with new drug delivery system sales exceeding 10 billion dollars per year^[1]. 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 will develop and integrate applied drug delivery coursework and experiments throughout the Rowan Engineering curriculum. To design and produce a new drug delivery system, an engineer must fully understand the drug and material properties and the processing variables that affect the release of the drug from the system. This requires a solid grasp of the fundamentals of mass transfer, reaction kinetics, thermodynamics and transport phenomena. The engineer 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 aims to provide engineering students with skills relevant to the field of drug delivery. This paper describes seven modules in which students apply engineering principles to the design, preparation, characterization, and analysis of drug delivery systems. A variety of drug delivery systems are explored including tablets, transdermal delivery systems, osmotic pumps, and supercritical fluid-processed particles. Experiments were developed to investigate the rate controlling mechanisms of different types of controlled release systems and to explore drug stability and to determine shelf life.