THREE-DIMENSIONAL QUADRATIC MODEL OF PACLITAXEL RELEASE FROM BIODEGRADABLE POLYMER FILMS

This paper presents a three-dimensional (3D) quadratic partial differential equation model of the drug release from a thin film of biodegradable polymer to a surrounding medium. Its very innovative feature is to go directly from the experimental normalized release curves of Lao and Venkatraman [J. Control. Release, 130 (2008), pp. 9-14] to a flux condition at the interface between the polymer and the medium that only requires the identification of the two parameters of the highly accurate ordinary differential equation model of Blanchet, Delfour, and Garon [SIAM J. Appl. Math., 71 (2011), pp. 2269-2286]. In the context of drug eluting stents, it is a practical and economical tool to theoretically and numerically simulate the 3D release of drug from the thin polymer film to the integrated wall and lumen of the blood vessel for evaluation and design. This approach avoids resorting to time-dependent or nonlinear diffusion in the polymer.