Ethical Issues on Drug Delivery and Its Impact in Healthcare

Medical ethics is all about study on a specific clinical problem, facts, and finding reasoning to determine the best medical practices. In the healthcare sector, it mostly assists the patients, communities, and healthcare providers in making a decision on treatment options, procedures, and other issues that emerge in the health sectors. Drug discovery is the process of discovering novel candidate treatments in biotechnology and pharmacology. Nowadays, chronic illnesses such as cancer is a major concern. Every year, around 1.5 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer. Inappropriate proportion of drug delivery or stopping a medication regimen in cancer treatment may lead to several side effects. Cancer chemotherapy involves use of anti-cancer drugs which are not free from toxic side effects. A suitable medication schedule is required for the drug scheduling that might help in making decision on which drug is to be delivered in time. It, in turn, reduces the size of the cancer cell under minimizing adverse effects. In this chapter, analytical studies have been conducted in order to plan such medication dose regimens to achieve the desired results. In the earlier study, the problem is modeled as an optimization problem that has been solved by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Population-Based Incremental Learning (PBIL). In this chapter, a Complete Elitist Genetic Algorithm (CEGA) has been proposed to solve the problem. Later, both efficiency and efficacy of CEGA are better demonstrated in terms of cancer reduction and minimal adverse effects. Further, CEGA has been proven to be better than the conventional treatment methods and is also concluded superior to both PSO and PBIL.