treatment whose aim is to increase drug effectiveness
and patient compliance, to reduce the administration
frequency and side effects connected to dosing.
As a matter of fact, controlled release formulations
bring engineers and pharmacists to work
together
with the common aim of realizing more and
more
effective products. For this purpose, the use of
mathematical
modeling turns out to be very useful
as
this approach enables, in the best case, the prediction
of release kinetics before the release systems
are
realized. More often, it allows the measurement
of
some important physical parameters, such as the
drug
diffusion coefficient and resorting to model fitting
on experimental release data. Thus, mathematical
modeling, whose development requires the comprehension
of all the phenomena affecting drug
release
kinetics
(4), has a very important value in the
process optimization of such formulation. The
model can be simply thought as a ìmathematical
metaphor of some aspects of realityî that, in this
case, identifies with the ensemble of phenomena ruling
release kinetics (5-9). For this generality, mathematical
modeling is widely employed in different
disciplines
such as genetics, medicine, psychology,
biology,
economy and obviously engineering and
technology