Saikat Basu, an assistant professor in South Dakota State University's Department of Mechanical Engineering, was awarded a one-year, $99,710 grant to develop and design a digital platform that will assess the targeted delivery of a wide range of nasal spray and oral inhaler products. The grant comes by way of the recently established Haarberg Center for Drug, Disease and Delivery Exploratory Grant Program, housed in SDSU's College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Professions.
The Haarberg 3D Center is funded by the South Dakota Board of Regents, with a goal of advancing research commercialization of biomedical technologies through university, industry and clinical collaborations. Recently, the center received a $1.1 million gift from Kevin and Lorie Haarberg and a planned gift of $10 million. The digital platform, conceptualized by Basu, will be the first of its kind and will calculate the efficiency of nasal sprays or oral inhalers for drug delivery to clinical target sites along the nose, nasal cavity, mouth and throat. "With the Haarberg 3D Exploratory Grant Program, the leadership team and the grant proposal reviewers were looking to support work that is at the intersection of academia and industry, with the idea that there should be a commercial component integral to the work that we are doing," Basu said. "I'm not a very business-minded person, so it took me a while to figure out how we could translate our work. I sought opinions from our industry collaborators. Eventually, I came up with an idea that we could build upon some of our previous work on modeling particle transport along the respiratory pathway and take it to the next level to create a digital interface that can quickly predict respiratory drug delivery for a wide range of drug formulations and delivery devices." The underlying research behind Basu's project is that commercially available airway drug delivery devices, for example, have different features that can impact where their particular drug is delivered inside the respiratory cavity. Basu's previous research understands that the size of the sprayed particles, the density of the drug formulation, the angle of the device, and the speed at which the drug droplets and aerosols are released all can affect where the drug gets deposited. By building upon previous research and utilizing state-of-the-art, experimentally validated computational fluid dynamics modeling, Basu will gather parameters from a wide array of nasal sprays and oral inhalers. He will use that data to create a digital platform where pharmaceutical companies can test their formulations and devices by inputting their own product-specific numbers. The outputs from the platform will be predictive estimates for targeted drug delivery for a wide variety of respiratory diseases. The work is supported by peer-reviewed journal papers and conference articles published by Basu’s team over the previous three years on SARS-CoV-2 virion deposition in the respiratory cavity and on how to optimize targeted drug delivery for complications such as COVID-19, chronic rhinosinusitis and laryngeal granulomas. As Basu notes, there are a large number of drug delivery companies for nasal sprays and oral inhalers on the market. This new platform would be accessible to them for a fee. "The companies will be able to plug in their numbers, and then the platform will be able to figure out what the targeted delivery should be for their product and whether it is going to be therapeutically effective or not," Basu explained. The global market drug size for nasal spray and oral inhaler products was valued at $17.5 billion in 2021. With a rise in chronic respiratory diseases globally, the annual market growth rate is project at 8.96%, with a forecasted market size of $38.4 billion by 2030. "The market for this work is there and will continue to be there," Basu said. Three pharmaceutical companies—Aptar Pharma, Dr. Ferrer Biopharma, LLC and Fractal Therapeutics—have already committed their support to this project. Basu will work with two graduate-level students to assist with the necessary simulations, experiments and testing needed to acquire the baseline information. Basu expects that the research team will have a viable digital platform ready for use after the 12-month grant funding is complete. Further, he said there may be opportunities for federal-level funding to improve this platform in the future.
Categories: South Dakota, General