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Traditional drug delivery systems, such as intravascular injection or oral ingestion, often have poor biopharmaceutical properties, as only a small portion of the medication reaches the target site. Targeted drug delivery, on the contrary, delivers medication in a concentrated amount at diseased tissue, improving efficacy and reducing side effects. A major challenge in targeted drug delivery is to efficiently reach the diseased tissue, as the pharmacokinetics of this therapy highly depend on the rate at which drug carriers reach their target. Nanoparticles have proven to be efficient carriers for this application due to their small size, biological mobility and tunable reactivity. In this thesis, we investigated the diffusion of nanoparticles in polymer networks resembling an extracellular matrix by molecular dynamics simulations, to aid the design of targeted drug delivery therapies. With the help of several statistical analyses, we quantitatively described the motion of these particles. To check the robustness of these analyses, we simulated Brownian motion and studied how the time of the simulation and the number of particles in the simulation influenced the accuracy of these analyses. Afterwards, the e ect of the polymer network on the diffusive motion was investigated. The structure of the polymer network was gradually altered throughout several simulations, where with each change a more realistic model of the network was created. With this approach, we were able to clearly detect how each individual aspect of the network affected the diffusive motion. A higher volume fraction of the polymer network in the observed sample resulted in a more obstructed diffusion, which was observed as emergent sub-diffusive motion. Also, the alignment of the network influenced the diffusion of the particles. Where less aligned networks were harder to penetrate by the particles, which could be seen as an increased transition towards sub-diffusion. These results can help us further understand the diffusive motion of nanoparticles in polymer networks resembling an extracellular matrix, in order to create appropriate targeted drug delivery designs.
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