Exploring Drug Delivery Dynamics at Various Interaction Scales

Dear Colleagues,

Drug delivery is one of the most important fields related to contemporary medicine and healthcare. Comprising different approaches and different systems, drug delivery refers to the transportation of pharmaceutical active compounds within a living organism, facilitating their therapeutic effects. To this end, a plethora of drug delivery systems have been created, from simple formulations whereby the drug is simply dispersed into a matrix, to more complex ones such as artificial micromotors. Polymers play an integral role in the advancement of drug delivery technology. Either synthetic or of natural origin, they can modulate drug behavior, not only due to their intrinsic properties but also due to specific interactions developed with the drug in question. They can trigger the controlled release of therapeutic agents, cyclic dosage, the tunable release of both hydrophilic and hydrophobic drugs, controlled release at a specific site, and so on. Yet, with all of this progress, many disease treatments still have unacceptable side effects, encouraging continued efforts to achieve the targeted delivery of drugs while mitigating their side effects.

To help with the development of new, more efficient drug delivery systems, theoretical models have been developed alongside the experimental approaches, with the aim of understanding the complex dynamics of drug–carrier formulations. The traditional models used to this end are based on the hypothesis of homogeneity in its various forms, which has become almost dogmatic in classical physics. The functionality of such a hypothesis is that it allows for the development of a class of differentiable models in the description of the dynamics of complex systems. However, complex systems are nowadays understood as inherently non-differential (fractal), especially in biological complex microenvironments, where any drug molecule, metabolic enzyme or pharmacological receptor are unanimously recognized as unstirred, space-restricted, heterogeneous, and geometrically fractal. Thus, the definition of new types of models are welcomed for describing complex system dynamics. A particular class of models is represented by the fractal dynamics which imply the use of fractional calculus, expanding on the notion of dimension and allowing, in the context of “compartmental analysis”, us to describe diffusion in dense objects, dynamics in polymeric networks, diffusion in porous and fractal media, and kinetics in viscoelastic media, etc.

In this framework, this Special Issue aims to attract novel and exciting experimental and theoretical research concerning drug delivery scenarios and control, directed towards both fundamental research and medical applications.

Prof. Dr. Maricel Agop
Guest Editor

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