Inverse Mechanistic Modeling of Transdermal Drug Delivery for Fast Identification of Optimal Model Parameters

Transdermal drug delivery systems are a key technology to administer drugs with a high first-pass effect in a non-invasive and controlled way. Physics-based modeling and simulation are on their way to become a cornerstone in the engineering of these healthcare devices since it provides a unique complementarity to experimental data and additional insights. Simulations enable to virtually probe the drug transport inside the skin at each point in time and space. However, the tedious experimental or numerical determination of material properties currently forms a bottleneck in the modeling workflow. We show that multiparameter inverse modeling to determine the drug diffusion and partition coefficients is a fast and reliable alternative. We demonstrate this strategy for transdermal delivery of fentanyl. We found that inverse modeling reduced the normalized root mean square deviation of the measured drug uptake flux from 26 to 9%, when compared to the experimental measurement of all skin properties. We found that this improved agreement with experiments was only possible if the diffusion in the reservoir holding the drug was smaller than the experimentally measured diffusion coefficients suggested. For indirect inverse modeling, which systematically explores the entire parametric space, 30,000 simulations were required. By relying on direct inverse modeling, we reduced the number of simulations to be performed to only 300, so a factor 100 difference. The modeling approach’s added value is that it can be calibrated once in-silico for all model parameters simultaneously by solely relying on a single measurement of the drug uptake flux evolution over time. We showed that this calibrated model could accurately be used to simulate transdermal patches with other drug doses. We showed that inverse modeling is a fast way to build up an accurate mechanistic model for drug delivery. This strategy opens the door to clinically ready therapy that is tailored to patients.