Before personalized, precision medicine can achieve its expected potential in the fields of medicine and biomedicine, issues of efficiency and affordability must be addressed. The research contained in this thesis is accordingly directed toward these goals through the co-development of an improved mechanism for injecting medicine over long periods of time into normally inaccessible parts of the body, in particular the brain. The device is designed as a capacitor-resistor structure, in which a reservoir is filled with the fluid to be administered, either by applying positive pressure with a syringe needle piercing a membrane, or negative pressure to a membrane with the catheter end submerged in the fluid. Either of these actions can be viewed as charging a capacitor. As the reservoir is filled, an elastic membrane expands while a corresponding pressure (gradient) is applied to a narrow output capillary, which accordingly resists the applied pressure and restricts the flow rate out of the reservoir. This enables the slow release of the desired substance while minimizing the negative invasive effects. Since such devices can potentially be adapted to a wide variety of medical purposes, the experimental and theoretical results of this thesis could find broad application in the design of future drug delivery systems.
Sonia Yevick (Thu,) studied this question.