Precisely controlled delivery of drugs, bioagents and cells directly to the heart has the potential to dramatically improve regenerative cardiac therapy for ischemic heart failure. Likewise, localized therapy delivery to ischemic tissue can increase retention at the target site and reduce adverse systemic effects. The objective of the proposed work is to use computational modelling (Finite Element Analysis – FEA including Fluid-Structure Interaction – FSI) to simulate drug release kinetics from a replenishable indwelling device (the therapeutic pericardiuim or “thericardium”) across a porous membrane to the native heart tissue in order to optimize the device design and to provide fundamental insights into the functionality of the implantable drug delivery system. The key goals will be to (i) experimentally characterize the drug transport and mechanical properties of this device for input into computational model, (ii) the creation of a multi-scale computational model in finite element system that can predict therapy concentration in the tissue to allow device optimization and extrapolation of accurate dosing and timing of therapy replenishments and (iii) the validation of the computational model compared to existing pre-clinical data. Future work will include further pre-clinical studies to implement the enhanced device design and drug delivery regimen from this work.
