  Controlled drug delivery (CDD), the controlled release and delivery of
therapeutic drugs inside the human body, is a promising approach to increase
the efficacy of drug administration and reduce harmful side effects to the
body. CDD has been a major research focus in the field of molecular
communications (MC) with the goal to aid the design and optimization of CDD
systems with communication theoretical analysis. However, the existing studies
of CDD under the MC framework are purely theoretical, and the potential of MC
for the development of practical CDD applications remains yet to be shown. This
paper presents a step towards filling this research gap. Specifically, we
present a novel MC-based model for a specific CDD system in which drugs are
embedded into microparticles and released gradually towards the target site. It
is demonstrated that the proposed model is able to faithfully reproduce
experimental data. Furthermore, statistical analysis is conducted to explore
the impact of the microparticle size on the drug release. The presented results
reveal the sensitivity of the drug release to changes in the microparticle
size. In this way, the proposed model can be used for the design of future
microparticle-based CDD systems.
