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 . 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. Introduction This project comprises seven modules that introduce students to multidisciplinary engineering principles through application to drug delivery systems. This project modifies measurement techniques and laboratory experiments widely used in the pharmaceutical sciences, to teach engineering principles. Material from the seven modules is being integrated vertically into the curriculum beginning with the Freshman Clinic, then fundamental Engineering courses, followed by Junior-Senior Clinic research projects, and finally advanced level electives on pharmaceutical topics. At the freshman level, students are engaged in the scientific discovery process with exciting hands-on analysis of commercial drug delivery systems. In more advanced courses, students design and formulate drug delivery systems and investigate the variables affecting their behavior. The Junior/Senior Clinic provides an opportunity for students to perform research projects related to drug delivery in a multidisciplinary setting.