Over the past two decades, there has been a significant increase in the need for chemical engineers in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology fields. Many departments across the country modified their curricula to include bio-focused courses to prepare chemical engineers for those industries. In addition to having courses on pharma-related topics, it would be beneficial to also incorporate a hands-on experiment that teaches students about pharma-related topics such as drug delivery. Here, we developed a model drug delivery experiment that uses sodium alginate beads filled with food coloring, the representative drug, and investigates different variables that affect “drug” release. In this experiment, a mixture of sodium alginate, water and food coloring is added to a calcium chloride solution to form sodium alginate beads. The beads are then rinsed, dried and added to a dissolution solution where the food coloring concentration is measured over time using spectrophotometry. Variables that were tested were the bead size, the pH of the dissolution solution and the concentration of the calcium chloride curing solution. In one-hour experiments, it was observed that each of these tested variables can greatly affect the rate of release. Specifically, decreasing bead size and increasing pH each separately increased drug release while increasing calcium chloride concentration decreased the rate of release. The experiment is cost-effective, safe, and had reproducible results that aligned with what is expected based on theory. There is great potential for this experiment to be integrated into the chemical engineering curriculum to teach students about drug delivery and to prepare them for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.
