SEMINAR: Bayliss Seminar Series

Sight is arguably the most important of the five senses. Consequently, eye diseases and eye injuries that lead to visual impairment and blindness can have severe impacts on the lives of the victims. Worldwide, millions of people suffer traumatic eye injury or surgical wounds yearly, and these injuries and surgical wounds require a suitable means of closure. The currently available sutures and staplings have serious disadvantages and can lead to complications such as inflammation. Therefore, there is a pressing need of new kinds of ophthalmic adhesives (polymers or copolymers) to meet ophthalmic surgeons’ requirements to treat and heal surgical wounds.

This research project proposes to synthesize new polymers based on N-acryloxysuccinimide that can be used as ophthalmic adhesive. The main role of these kinds of polymers is to repair ocular wounds resulting from ophthalmic surgeries, lacerations, corneal transplanting, perforations or any physical tissue damage, without using sutures. This research will focus on development of new polymer materials which are biodegradable, biocompatible and have shown no toxicities towards living cells. These types of polymers (adhesives) have unique design requirements such as solubility, biodegradability, mechanical properties, swell ability, diffusion coefficient, refractive index, adhesion strength, cytotoxicity, viscosity, transparency, and residence time on wound. Furthermore, because N-acryloxysuccimide moieties can interact directly with amine and thiol groups in proteins such as collagen, the target polymers should be stronger adhesives than the currently commercially available adhesives.