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Friday, October 25, 2019
About the Presentation
Many central nervous system (CNS) diseases are difficult to treat effectively with blood-based drug delivery methods because the blood-brain barrier severely restricts or entirely blocks the passage of most drugs and biologics to the CNS tissue. One way to bypass the blood-brain barrier is through drug delivery to the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), a clear, colorless fluid that surrounds the entire brain and spinal cord. A wide variety of drugs can be administered directly to the CSF at much lower dosages than to the bloodstream and typically fewer side effects. Although promising, clinical use of CSF drug delivery is limited by a lack of understanding about solute transport within the CSF and absorption into the CNS tissue. To gain such understanding is challenging given that the CSF moves back-and-forth with each heartbeat through a highly complex geometry.
While computational modeling is a powerful tool with the potential to provide deep insight into CSF drug delivery, more realistic computational models of CSF drug delivery are needed. Additional complicating factors are that CSF anatomy and physiology can vary substantially in CNS disease states and with age. A key advantage of a computational model is its potential to optimize patient-specific therapies (e.g., drug properties, delivery location, and injection volume to the target tissue). This is especially important for drugs that can cost more than $1M for a single dose.
This talk will cover the work we are doing within the Neurophysiological Imaging and Modeling Laboratory (www.niml.org) to formulate and validate a computational and in vitro modeling pipeline that uses information from magnetic resonance images (MRI) to build patient-specific CSF drug delivery models. Ultimately, we envision the use of the pipeline by clinicians, pharmacological, and medical device companies to optimize patient-specific delivery of potentially life-altering CNS disease medications.
Due to the sensitive nature of some of the research presented, a video will not be posted for this seminar.
About the Presenter
About the Presenter
Dr. Bryn Martin is an associate professor of Biological Engineering at the University of Idaho (2015-present). Martin served as director of the Conquer Chiari Research Center at the University of Akron (2012-15), completed post-doctoral training at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (2009-12) and earned a doctorate in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2008). Martin has been employed in a number of medical device companies and is an active medTech inventor, consultant, and scientific advisory board member. He serves as an executive board member to a number of international societies in the field of cerebrospinal fluid dynamics and CNS diseases.
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