Background: The new concepts of personalized and precision medicine require the design of more and more refined delivery systems. In this frame, hydrogels can play a very important role as they represent the best surrogate of soft living tissues for what concerns rheological properties. Thus, this paper focusses on a global theoretical approach able to describe how hydrogel polymeric networks can affect the release kinetics of drugs characterized by different sizes. The attention is focused on a case study dealing with an interpenetrated hydrogel made up by alginate and poly(N-vinyl-2-pyrrolidone).
Methods: Information about polymeric network characteristics (mesh size distribution and polymer volume fraction) is deduced from the theoretical interpretation of the rheological and the low field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) characterization of hydrogels. This information is then, embodied in the mass balance equation whose resolution provides the release kinetics.
Results: Our simulations indicate the influence of network characteristics on release kinetics. In addition, the reliability of the proposed approach is supported by the comparison of the model outcome with experimental release data.
Conclusions: This study underlines the necessity of a global theoretical approach in order to design reliable delivery systems based on hydrogels.
Keywords: drug release; hydrogel; low field NMR; mathematical modelling; rheology.