Design of Anti-HIV Microbicide Polymeric Delivery Vehicles

The purpose of this research is to design a microbicide delivery vehicle that prevents the spread of HIV/AIDS among women in developing countries. The product will be new, discrete, and economical giving women more power over their health. The delivery vehicle will be a polymeric gel or cream. In order to rationally design such a polymeric vehicle, a model is needed which relates chemical structure to relevant physical and biochemical properties. The development of such a model requires a training set: a group of well-characterized polymeric liquids for which consistent experimental data is compiled. The desired characteristics of these delivery vehicles will be designed from the data gathered by testing 14 different polymeric liquids and varying combinations of them. The characteristics preferred will be based on viscosity, vescoelasticity, and how well it fits a power-law graph of different target physical properties. The design of these polymeric vehicles involves the use of optimizing the molecular structure with high-powered computers using a program called Computational Molecular Design (CMD). This process will eliminate unnecessary steps in the development phase. The end product will consist of a polymeric liquid delivery vehicle with anti-HIV microbicides that will be applied to the epithelial lining of the vaginal cavity. This project will protect women financially, socially, and most importantly, from the spread of STI/HIV.