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

随着人口老龄化和生活方式因素的增加，眼部疾病已成为加拿大人健康的重大负担。眼疾不仅影响视力，还可能对生活质量产生重大影响。视力受损的患者已被证明患有抑郁症的发病率显着增加，更早地进入养老院，更经常摔倒，并且比视力正常的人群死亡年龄要小得多。虽然在新疗法的开发方面已经取得了重大进展，但眼睛的解剖结构使得这些药物的递送是困难的。Sheardown实验室的工作旨在开发基于新材料的眼部治疗方法，包括例如针对眼睛前部和后部的新型药物输送装置，以及用于隐形眼镜，人工晶状体和玻璃体替代物和眼组织工程的新材料和表面。目前的计划将使用已应用于药物发现的高通量合成和表征方法，以促进这些材料的开发。这些方法将使我们能够生成和筛选数千种候选材料组合物，并确定那些可能具有特性的组合，这些特性将使它们成为进一步开发和评估的候选材料。将筛选用于各种应用的材料，包括将药物输送到眼睛的前部和后部，作为新的接触透镜材料，作为并发症发生率较低的人工晶状体和作为玻璃体替代物。

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.