(194a) Modeling Drug Delivery By Electrokinetic-Based Methods in Cancer Tumor Treatment

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. The work reported herein is aimed at modeling drug delivery under the influence of an external electric field, with the goal of creating more of a “targeted” cancer tumor treatment. 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 selected a cylindrical 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.