Interfacial Control and Manipulation for the Development of New Ophthalmic Materials and Drug Delivery Systems

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With the aging population and increasing lifestyle factors, diseases of the eye have become significant burdens to the health of Canadians. Not only does eye disease impact the ability to see, it can have a significant effect on quality of life. Vision impaired patients have been shown to suffer a significantly increased incidence of depression, are admitted to nursing homes earlier, fall more often and die at a significantly younger age than the sighted population. While there have been significant advances in the development of new therapeutics, the anatomy of the eye is such that delivery of these drugs is difficult. The work in the Sheardown lab is aimed at the development of new materials based methods for ocular treatment, including for example novel drug delivery devices targeting both the front and back of the eye as well as new materials and surfaces for contact lenses, intraocular lenses and vitreous substitutes and ocular tissue engineering. The current program will use high throughput synthesis and characterization methods that have been applied to drug discovery to facilitate the development of these materials. These methods will allow us to generate and screen thousands of candidate materials compositions and identify those combinations that may have properties which would make them candidates for further development and evaluation. Materials will be screened for various applications including delivery of drugs to the front and back of the eye, as new contact lens materials, as intraocular lenses with lower complication rates and as vitreous substitutes.