I-Corps: All-in-One Virtual Human Testing Platform for Inhalation

Award ID: 2321544

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a virtual platform to design and test inhalers for human medical applications. The proposed technology is designed to simulate airflow and the inhalation of aerosolized medication emitted from various types of inhalers in both healthy and diseased lungs, as well as drug translocation to other parts of the human body. Currently, ineffective therapeutic outcomes cause 365 million patients to suffer from lung diseases due to low medication delivery efficiency to small airways. Technology to aid in the development of more effective inhalers may help to achieve better drug delivery and therapeutic outcomes. The proposed platform may be used to quantify airflow and the delivered dose of aerosolized medication emitted from inhalers into human respiratory systems, as well as the translocation of medications in the whole body. The proposed platform may save 66% of the cost and 90% of the time for inhaler development and approval, accelerating pulmonary healthcare research and the development of new therapeutics that require inhalers. This may improve pulmonary health and quality of life for patients with lung diseases. This I-Corps project is based on the development of a software platform to simulate airflow and the inhalation of aerosolized medication emitted from various types of inhalers. The proposed technology is a web-based user interface and cloud-computing platform that may be used to evaluate inhaler performance and bioequivalence. The proposed platform uses disease-specific whole-lung models to understand how inhalers deliver accurate doses in disease-specific and patient-specific lung environments. In addition, it may be used to evaluate how lung disease can change lung elasticities and airway morphologies to affect drug deposition, and provide high-resolution data to enhance the fundamental understanding of how disease conditions, inhaler design, and drug formulation can influence drug delivery efficiency to designated lung sites for lung disease treatments. Evaluation of new inhalation device performance using this platform may accelerate the process of inhaler innovation and regulatory approval of new products to treat pulmonary diseases as well as advance inhaler innovation beyond what existing computational lung models have achieved. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Ruth Shuman