Convective and diffusive transport in drug delivery

Abstract

Spatiotemporal distribution profiles of drugs in solid tissues are determined by a complex interplay of convective and dispersive forces with mechanisms of drug sequestration, clearance, and metabolism. Understanding how these processes couple with drug delivery modality, kinetics, and dose to determine the fate of delivered drugs en route to and in target tissue has been challenging. Drawing upon examples in local intratumoral and endovascular drug delivery, this chapter reviews how such understanding can be achieved through a combination of reductive experiments, computational modeling, and dimensional analysis.