Peter Hinow

We use a mathematical model to describe the delivery of a drug to the specific region of the brain.The drug is carried by liposomes that can release their cargo by application of focused ultrasound. Thereupon, the drug is absorbed through the endothelial cells that line the brain capillaries and form the physiologically important blood-brain barrier. We present a compartmental model of a capillary that is able to capture the complex binding and transport processes the drug undergoes in the blood plasma and at the blood-brain barrier. We apply this model to the delivery of L-dopa, (used to treat Parkinson’s disease) and doxorubicin (an anticancer agent). The goal is to optimize the delivery of drug while at the same time minimizing possible side effects of the ultrasound. In a second project, we present a mathematical model for drug delivery through capillary networks with increasingly complex topologies with the goal to understand the scaling behavior of model predictions on a coarse-to-fine sequence of grids.
This is joint work with Ami Radunskaya (Pomona College, CA) and John Reynolds ( University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand).

Refreshments will precede the talk at 3:30pm in Bond Hall 300.