Drug delivery from polymeric lenses

Description | Diseases of the anterior segment of the eye are mostly treated by topical administration in the anterior fornix of the conjunctiva. Nevertheless the procedure is extremely inefficient because when a drop is instilled in the eye, the ophthalmic drug has a short residence time in the conjunctiva sac, less than 5 minutes. Moreover, only 1-5% of the applied drug penetrates in the cornea reaching the intraocular tissue.
To avoid the drawbacks of the topical administration, therapeutic lenses were designed to increase the ocular bioavailability of the ophthalmic drugs. A polymer is combined with drug in a such a way that the release profile is predefined. Several types of lenses were proposed: simple polymer membranes with dispersed drug, polymeric platforms with dispersed particles encapsulating drug and multilayer lenses. The main objective of this work is to study the drug evolution in the anterior chamber when different polymeric platforms are used to deliver the drug.

Coordinator | José Augusto Ferreira, CMUC-University of Coimbra.

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