Authored by the Simon group - Providing more effective and affordable health care

Laboratory Online is a series of educational and interactive modules offered by the Simon group. The purpose of the project is to enhance knowledge in drug-delivery technologies and underlying engineering principles. Within this user-friendly environment, practitioners and researchers can enter their own process parameter values in corresponding boxes (or use the default quantities provided). The findings of the simulation study are monitored in real-time by pressing the red-shaded button near the bottom of the page.

Drug released across a membrane

This program estimates the cumulative amount of drug released through the skin at the skin/receptor cell boundary. Initially, the skin is drug-free and the medicament is uniformly distributed within the vehicle. Drug transport through the assumed homogeneous membrane (thickness h) can be described by Fick's second law of diffusion (Fig. 1) where D is the diffusion coefficient, t represents the time, C is the concentration and x is the spatial variable. The cumulative amount of drug released per unit area (Q) is approximated by a series solution [1].




Fig. 1. Drug transport across a membrane.

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ENTER DATA HERE

D : cm²/h

h : cm

C_s : µg/mL

Cumulative amount of drug released per unit area (µg/cm²)



Diffusion flux into the receiver compartment (µg/cm²h)

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References

[1] J. Crank, The Mathematics of Diffusion, Oxford University Press, New York, 1975.

Released 11/05/08. Recently modified 11/05/08.
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