Open AccessA Mathematical Model to Expedite Electroporation Based Vaccine Development for COVID-19
Author(s) -
Adarsh Sharma,
Debarshi Ghosh,
N. K. Saluja,
Thakur Gurjeet Singh
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
biointerface research in applied chemistry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.216
H-Index - 11
ISSN - 2069-5837
DOI - 10.33263/briac122.19511961
Subject(s) - electroporation , multiphysics , computer science , dna vaccination , drug delivery , covid-19 , expression (computer science) , plasmid , computational biology , microbiology and biotechnology , nanotechnology , medicine , biology , materials science , dna , physics , genetics , disease , pathology , finite element method , gene , infectious disease (medical specialty) , thermodynamics , programming language
Electroporation has an application in the selective delivery of drugs explicitly into cells. However, the challenge is to achieve efficiency in delivering the drugs. The key parameter responsible for successful electroporation-mediated drug delivery is induced transmembrane voltage (ITMV). The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has recently approved the clinical trials of DNA plasmid delivery of the COVID-19 vaccine through electroporation. The requirement is to develop a COVID-19 vaccine within a limited time. Hence, the extensive amount of laboratory experiments are not feasible. It has increased dependency on simulation-based analysis. The simulations of electroporation depend on ITMV expression for the specified cell and the environment. In this paper, we have derived the closed-form expression of ITMV (∆Vm). The closed-form expression is used in COMSOL Multiphysics simulation to obtain extracellular concentration variation as a function of time. The simulation results match the empirical results from the literature and hence validate the closed-form expression. The closed-form expression will reduce the development time of electroporation-assisted COVID-19 vaccine delivery.