A Mathematical Model to Expedite Electroporation Based Vaccine Development for COVID-19

Electroporation has an application in the selective delivery of drugs explicitly into cells. However, the challenge is to achieve efficiency in delis eying the drugs. The key parameter responsible for successful electroporation-mediated drug deliver is induced transmembrane outage (ITMV). The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has recently approved the clinical trials of DNA plasmid delivery of the COVID-19 vaccine through electroporation. The requirement is to develop a COVID-19 vaccine within a limited time. hence the extensive amount of laboratory experiments are not feasible. It has increased dependency on simulation-based analysis. The simulations of electroporation depend on ITMV expression for the specified cell and the environment. In this paper, we have derived the closed-form expression of ITMV (Delta V-m), The closed -form expression is used in COMSOL Multiphysics simulation to obtain extracellular concentration variation as a function of time. The simulation results match the empirical results from the literature and hence validate the closed -form expression. The closed-form expression reduce the development time of electroporation-assisted COVID-19 accine delivery.

Automated summary

Electroporation has applications in selective drug delivery to cells, with the key parameter of induced transmembrane outage (ITMV) determining its success. The FDA recently approved clinical trials for delivering the COVID-19 vaccine through electroporation. Due to time constraints, extensive laboratory experiments are not feasible, leading to increased reliance on simulation-based analysis. This paper presents a closed-form expression of ITMV and validates it through COMSOL Multiphysics simulations, reducing development time for electroporation-assisted COVID-19 vaccine delivery.