Analysis and Design of Iontophoretic Drug Delivery system for the Efficient Treatment of Brain Tumors

Abstract

There are many different types of brain tumors. Especially, among them, glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common type of malignant brain tumor. In conventional therapy, the first treatment of GBM is surgical resection. However, the recurrence of GBM is almost inevitable and re-resection is not the best option for patients with recurrent GBM (rGBM). Therefore, it is important to develop and complement this with other treatments such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy, etc. more effectively. Therefore, we devised a new drug delivery system using the principle of iontophoresis for the chemotherapy of brain tumors and ran a numerical simulation to verify the effectiveness of the system. These simulations were conducted with a realistic head model based on a magnetic resonance image (MRI) data, and a brain tumor model was created in the white matter of the head model. For the calculation of electric fields, the Laplacian equation derived from the maxwell equation was solved. Using these results, we can solve the Nernst-Planck equation for the calculation of drug concentration. The brain tumor model has one of the three shapes referring to previous research. In this study, we explored and verified the optimal way that efficiently diffuses nanoparticles for each brain tumor shape. We placed electrodes in two or three different ways for each brain tumor model, and comparative analysis was conducted for each way. We indicated the effectiveness of the drug delivery system according to tumor shape and electrode configuration using three criteria. This study is expected to be a good guide for physicians who would apply this system.