Combinatorial design of passive drug delivery platforms

We introduce a novel computational approach to designing passive drug delivery systems based on porous materials such as hydrogels. Our approach uses three tools: a method to establish the exact release pattern from all possible loading sites inside a given hydrogel; a method to generate a large number of hydrogel structures to be tested numerically, and finally an optimization algorithm which leads to the selection of optimal hydrogel structures. Using this approach, we show that controlled release curves can be obtained by using a genetic algorithm for the optimization step. Strategies to generalize this approach to other systems are also discussed. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.