Endogenous Nonionic Unsaturated Monoethanolamide Lipids as a Posterior Eye Drug Delivery System

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Retinoblastoma is a cancer of the eye that often affects children by the age of 3. Typical treatments currently include removal of the eye or chemotherapy. While novel therapeutics have been developed that may act as chemo-preventative agents and reduce the incidence of this cancer in susceptible children, the delivery of these drugs to the back of the eye remains an engineering challenge. To accommodate this, both a traditional and a novel drug delivery system are being explored. Due to the nature of the disease, an injection into the eye is undesirable, so sclera delivery methods using both traditional fibrin gels and also lipids which create a gel-like phase are being explored. These materials will be loaded with the required therapeutics and tailored such that the release of the drugs from the materials effectively maintains a therapeutic dose at the retinal site of interest to prevent the cancer formation for the desired length of time. After confirming the release kinetics by in vitro methods, this formulation would then undergo animal testing to confirm the results in vivo and determine any additional benefits or potential side effects. It is also believed that these novel lipids can be injected and will gel in situ, which while not suitable for a retinoblastoma application, will be explored for other posterior eye drug delivery applications such as age-related macular degeneration.