RHU assistant professor of mechanical engineering, Dr. Iyad Fayssal, was invited by the Medical Research Council at the United Kingdom to review a 2.1 Million pound research grant titled: “Establishing a method and device for drug delivery to the entire cochlea without breaking its boundaries”.
The peer-review process evaluated the technical content of the research, its clinical need, socio-economic impact, resources management and data management plans, and other pertinent project issues.
The inability to reliably deliver therapeutic compounds to the entire inner ear, leading to their ineffective distribution along the extended and narrow cochlear spiral, restrict current efforts to prevent and treat hearing dysfunctions. This incident is due to the intricate mechanical features of the perilymph hydrodynamics in the human cochlea.
The research grant proposes a transformative methodology, which will be developed by researchers at the University of Brighton (UK), that can consistently and uniformly deliver drugs along the whole cochlea in minutes. The method relies on a combination of intratympanic drug administration and a non-invasive technique of cochlear pumping to ensure uniform drug distribution along the entire length of the cochlea. The project objective is to establish optimal and safe parameters via a Computational Fluid Dynamics framework to achieve even and efficient cochlear drug delivery applicable to human subjects.