Building A Better Eye-Drop

Researcher Tannin Schmidt with Mijana Ridic from the Lion's Eye Bank: With the Lion's help, Schmidt was able to create a new eye drop that he believes will help many who suffer from painful diseases like Sjogren’s Syndrome.

 

 

New relief for dry eyes

University of Calgary, Kinesiology research, creates a better eye lubricant.

If you wear contact lenses you probably won’t be surprised to find out that Calgary is the dry eye capital of Canada. Our dry and windy climate creates tired eyes and can make wearing contacts a misery. Dry eye is actually a diagnosable syndrome in which the eye is unable to maintain a healthy layer of tears. The syndrome affects quality of life for millions of people and current treatments aren’t great. A University of Calgary, Kinesiology researcher hopes to change that.

Tannin Schmidt, PhD, was studying knee osteoarthritis, and in particular a lubricating protein called proteoglycan 4 – called PRG4 or more commonly lubricin. While lubricin is accepted as an important part of knee biomechanics, providing “WD40” for our knee joints, Schmidt found that when it is combined with hyaluronic acid (HA) it is even more effective.

At the time Schmidt was a graduate student, and one of his fellow students, Ben Sullivan, Ph.D (Now CSO of a publically traded company that makes a diagnostic for dry eye (TearLab) suggested that he turn his attention from the knee, to the eye. As a result of that conversation, his father David Sullivan, PhD, a researcher at Harvard’s Schepens Eye Research Institute discovered that lubricin is naturally present in our eyes, potentially lubricating the eyelid as we blink an average of 11,500 times a day.

To prove this, Schmidt created a mechanical device that could actually measure the friction between an eyelid and a cornea, but he needed human corneas to be able to run his tests. “I phoned up Mijana Ridic at the Lions Eye Bank,” recalls Schmidt, “and I was really grateful that she and the Eye Bank were so accommodating and helpful. Once the Lions understood what I was doing and saw the ethics approval, they were able to help; without them, this research would have never gotten off the ground.”

Using the Lions Eye Bank corneas (which were determined to be unfit for transplant) and his unique experimental set-up, Schmidt was able to show that his new eye drops - which combine lubricin with hyaluronic acid - was more effective at eye lubrication than any other product on the market.

“It’s encouraging,” says Schmidt, “many scientists go their entire career without seeing a direct benefit of their research on the community. I’m hopeful that within a few years these drops will be helping people with chronic, horribly painful dry eyes, such as people that suffer from Sjogren’s Syndrome. I’m also hopeful that these drops may improve the quality of life for people who wear contact lenses and suffer from dry eye syndrome, sometimes so severe that they actually develop wear tracks on the inside of their eye lids.”

Schmidt’s research on PRG4 lubrication is published in the January 2012 edition of the journal Eye & Contact Lens. A European pharmaceutical company has taken an interest in the research and is moving toward a clinical trial in the near future.

Posted: January 20, 2012

 

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Don McSwiney, Director of Communication Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary W: 403.220.7652 | C: 403-852-7652 | E: don.mcswiney@ucalgary.ca