Predicting the vascular adhesion of deformable drug carriers in narrow capillaries traversed by blood cell
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In vascular targeted therapies, blood-borne carriers should realize sustained drug release from the luminal side towards the diseased tissue. In this context, such carriers are required to firmly adhere to the vessel walls for a sufficient period of time while resisting force perturbations induced by the blood flow and circulating cells. Here, a hybrid computational model, combining a Lattice Boltzmann (LBM) and Immersed Boundary Methods (IBM), is proposed for predicting the strength of adhesion of particles in narrow capillaries (7.5 μm) traversed by blood cells. While flowing down the capillary, globular and biconcave deformable cells ( 7 μm ) encounter 2 μm discoidal particles, adhering to the vessel walls. Particles present aspect ratios ranging from 0.25 to 1.0 and a mechanical stiffness varying from rigid (Ca=0) to soft (Ca=10^-3). Cell-particle interactions are quantitatively predicted over time via three independent parameters: the cell membrane stretching δ p; the cell-to-particle distance r, and the number of engaged ligand-receptor bonds N_L.
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