MODELING THE IMPACT OF PEDIATRIC TONSIL SIZE ON AEROSOL DEPOSITION AND PULMONARY DRUG DELIVERY
Date
2024-05
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Aerosolized medicine is the leading method of drug delivery to the lungs. Lung-related
diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cystic fibrosis, asthma, pneumonia, and
recently COVID-19, are among the leading causes of mortality rates globally. Such respiratory
illnesses are of particular concern for pediatric patients, where acute respiratory infections are the
leading cause of death for children under 5 years old. Despite the prevalence of lung-centric
ailments, aerosolized medicine for children is severely understudied. Currently, the majority of
inhalable therapeutics prescribed to pediatric patients are adult formulations with adapted doses,
despite evidence proving that a child’s airways are anatomically dissimilar to an appropriately scaled down adult airway. Thus, there is a critical need to improve the characterization of aerosol
behavior within these pediatric airways.
This study aims to address that gap in knowledge by developing and validating a tool to
study the behavior of aerosols within patient airways. The advancement of additive manufacturing
techniques poses as an invaluable tool to deeply study organic and patient-specific airways without
the limitations and ethical considerations when otherwise studying human subject anatomy. In this
work, we begin to focus on the role of the tonsils in impacting aerosol deposition, as the tonsils
serve as a common point of infection and complication in child respiration. An idealized model
was proposed to model varying tonsil size within a patient-specific upper airway, and protocols
for experimental and computational validation were developed. These developments lay the
groundwork for future rigorous testing and model improvements which can be used to motivate
the formulation of better medicine for children to better treat both local illnesses within the tonsils,
as well as address respiratory infections within the lungs with aerosol formulations that can bypass
tonsil deposition.