Modelling Jet Nebulizers to Estimate Pulmonary Drug Deposition

Administration of medication directly to diseased lungs reduces adverse systemic side effects. For cystic fibrosis, jet nebulizers are the standard aerosol delivery system since they can aerosolize drugs that require relatively large volumes of liquid. Selection of the appropriate nebulizer for a given drug is crucial to ensure delivery of the therapeutic dose. This selection, ideally, requires knowledge of the pulmonary drug deposition (PDD). The gold standard for accurately measuring PDD is nuclear medicine techniques, which exposes the subject to radiation and therefore cannot be used repeatedly to test multiple devices. An alternative is to characterize the nebulizer using in vitro experiments and estimate the device’s in vivo performance. However these techniques are time-consuming and can only collect data for one breathing pattern and drug-device combination. Therefore this study is to formulate mathematical models for jet nebulizers that can estimate PDD based on the drug-device combination and patient’s breathing patterns.