Introducing Undergraduates to Transdermal Drug Delivery Using Chemical and Physical Permeation Enhancement Technology

In order to integrate hands-on Biomedical Engineering techniques into the undergraduate curriculum, we have developed a set of simple, cost-effective experiments related to principles of transdermal drug delivery.  Drug transport across porcine skin is explored using the drug caffeine with using two types of permeation enhancers: chemical and physical. The chemical enhancement technique used was a 30 minute skin pre-treatment of 50 vol% EtOH, followed by a 28 hour data acquisition period. The physical enhancement technique used was a 2 hour continuous treatment of Iontophoresis using a commercially available Iontophoresis delivery device. EtOH pre-treatment increased the caffeine flux by 170% in comparison to the control. Iontophoresis increased the caffeine flux by 95% in comparison to the control. These experiments are expected to be piloted in an introductory engineering course in the fall semester of 2013, and student learning will be assessed by evaluating knowledge gain.