Molecular communication for drug delivery systems: A survey

Drug delivery systems (DDS) are engineered methods to enable the targeted delivery of therapeutic agents at the right rate and location while minimizing the undesired side effects. The recent advances in bioengineering and nanotechnology make it possible to design molecular compounds with specific sizes, shapes, structures and chemical properties to improve the drug uptake and minimize its side effects. Despite all of this progress, overcoming the biological barriers to drug delivery remains challenging. Observing the parallels between the delivery of drugs and the delivery of data, a new paradigm in communication systems research, called molecular communication (MC), has been devised to approach this problem. This paper presents the state-of-the-art, challenges and research opportunities in studying DDS through the MC paradigm. First, the constituting elements of a DDS are presented, highlighting the contributions from MC research. Second, an overview is given of the novel modeling approaches based on communication theory and several simulation platforms applicable to the study of drug delivery systems are presented. Finally, lessons are drawn from the efforts of the MC community on this research topic and future research opportunities and challenges are discussed.