Modeling Drug Delivery by Electrokinetic-based Methods in Cancer Tumor Treatment

Abstract

According to the National Institute of Health, cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. In 2012 alone, there were 14 million new cases and 8.2 million cancer-related deaths. Because of the prevalence of this disease, there has been a national push to develop novel new therapies and drug delivery systems for cancer treatment. If certain drug delivery systems were influenced by an external electric field, there is a belief they could become “targeted” drug delivery. This is very important because of the complex, irregular vasculature of cancerous tumors that makes drug delivery very difficult. Alternative approaches, such as those based on electrokinetics, to those currently used in cancer tumor treatment could become very helpful if additional understanding of the role of the electrical field in the convective-diffusive transport of the drug can be gained. To further understand how to harness the promising technique mentioned above about the “targeted” drug delivery to the tumor site, the role that electrokinetic transport phenomena plays must be understood. In this presentation, we will select a geometry to model the biofluid motion and the transport of drugs driven by the electrical field. In order to accomplish this, an expression for the electrohydrodynamics must be found by studying the classical hydrodynamics coupled with the electroosmotic flow to determine their influences on the velocity profile. From there, the transport of solute (drug) moved by the electrokinetic phenomena will be analyzed. The final step would be to employ an area averaging technique.