Renee Smith Chemistry Grad Student B.S. in Chemistry, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (2005)

Polyelectrolyte multilayer drug delivery coatings for intraocular lens.

Cataracts, clouding of the eye’s natural lens, are the leading cause of blindness worldwide. Treatment for cataracts often involves the replacement of a patient’s natural lens with an artificial intraocular lens (IOL).  Postoperative side effects include pain, swelling, infection, and bleeding. If left untreated these conditions could result in the formation of secondary cataracts or irreversible blindness. To avoid these complications patients are required to administer a complex schedule of anti-inflammatory and antibiotic eyedrops daily for 4-6 weeks. For this treatment to be effective there must be efficient drug delivery to the eye and high patient compliance. However, both the efficacy of delivery to the required area and patient compliance is low. A practical solution is to coat the IOL for immediate and concurrent release of the antibiotic and anti-inflammatory.  Such a self-dosing IOL will eliminate the need for patient compliance and increase the therapeutic efficacy by maintaining a constant release at the surgical site. Recently, our group has shown that hydrolytically degradable polyelectrolyte multilayer coatings can be used to release multiple drugs sequentially. Thus the primary aim of my work is to utilize polyelectrolyte multilayers to create a multi-drug IOL with highly tailored release profiles in the form of a simple, thin conformal coating.