Drug Release Modeling from a Novel Temperature-responsive Polymeric System

Nowadays, environment-sensitive smart drug delivery systems have found diverse applications in pharmaceutical science and technology. These systems can respond to the environment stimuli such as temperature, pressure, pH, light, electrical and magnetical fields and etc. They can release the proper amount of drug in human body. Among these systems, special attention and much research works have been devoted to temperature responsive systems. Smart polymeric materials and hydrogels are widely used in production of temperature responsive systems. The temperature
responsive polymeric materials and their based smart drug delivery systems are not just responsive to temperature, as other stimuli may induce them as well. Therefore, in practical cases, their performances may be disordered and the drug release may not occur in an anticipated manner. Furthermore, the mathematical relations of drug release in these systems are very complicated. Therefore, in this work, a novel temperature responsive smart drug delivery
system is introduced in which the drug release would only be a function of temperature and its mathematical relations are also considerably simple. This system is composed of three individual layers. The modeling of this system
is performed by analyzing the heat and mass transfer equations at pseudo-steady state and the effects of system parameters on the performance of the system are investigated. The obtained results show that the performance of the system is drastically related to the types of materials of the system and also their physical and chemical properties. By using the obtained results in this work, we can design the temperature responsive smart drug delivery systems and optimize their performance in practical cases.