Spring Break
UMKC doctor brings future of eye treatment into focus
Greg Vandas
Issue date: 10/13/08 Section: News
Visual ailments once difficult to treat have now met their match thanks to the pioneering work of one of UMKC's esteemed medical researchers.
Dr. Ashim K. Mitra, Ph.D., the University of Missouri Curators' Professor of Pharmacy and chairman of UMKC's division of Pharmaceutical Sciences, recently developed a number of new ways to heal the human eye, replacing the former technological front-runners with more efficient and less painful treatments.
Motivated by the need for a clean and accurate method of delivering medicine to the back of the eye, Mitra invented liquid eye drops that are applied directly under the eyelid rather than on to the eyeball itself. The medication then utilizes the eye's blood vessels to get to the retina, a delicate, light-sensitive membrane lining the inner eyeball that has been increasingly plagued by disease and disorder in Americans.
"In the past, pharmacologists mainly looked [to treat] the front of the eye, but with the increasing number of diseases affecting the back of the eye, attention has now been focused there," Mitra said. "I realized, too, that something needed to be done to tackle this problem."
Once Mitra's drops reach the back of the eye, though, they encounter the eye's natural defenses, a system of efflux pumps that siphons out foreign material - including medicines.
But he has bypassed these chemical security measures, too.
By combining the medicine with an essential nutrient the eye cannot reject, as well as a steroid such as prednisone, he discovered he can "fool" the efflux pumps into allowing the medicine to pass.
Mitra's solution takes the place of old-fashioned topical eye drops, a widely-acknowledged nuisance because of their tendency to run out of the eye upon contact, causing most of the medicine to be lost.
Needle injections, which were once the only option in treating advanced back-of-the-eye problems like age-related macular degeneration, may also become obsolete in the future because of his work. The injections are often painful and can cause hemorrhaging and retinal damage, but Mitra's new application method is non-invasive and harmless.
Dr. Ashim K. Mitra, Ph.D., the University of Missouri Curators' Professor of Pharmacy and chairman of UMKC's division of Pharmaceutical Sciences, recently developed a number of new ways to heal the human eye, replacing the former technological front-runners with more efficient and less painful treatments.
Motivated by the need for a clean and accurate method of delivering medicine to the back of the eye, Mitra invented liquid eye drops that are applied directly under the eyelid rather than on to the eyeball itself. The medication then utilizes the eye's blood vessels to get to the retina, a delicate, light-sensitive membrane lining the inner eyeball that has been increasingly plagued by disease and disorder in Americans.
"In the past, pharmacologists mainly looked [to treat] the front of the eye, but with the increasing number of diseases affecting the back of the eye, attention has now been focused there," Mitra said. "I realized, too, that something needed to be done to tackle this problem."
Once Mitra's drops reach the back of the eye, though, they encounter the eye's natural defenses, a system of efflux pumps that siphons out foreign material - including medicines.
But he has bypassed these chemical security measures, too.
By combining the medicine with an essential nutrient the eye cannot reject, as well as a steroid such as prednisone, he discovered he can "fool" the efflux pumps into allowing the medicine to pass.
Mitra's solution takes the place of old-fashioned topical eye drops, a widely-acknowledged nuisance because of their tendency to run out of the eye upon contact, causing most of the medicine to be lost.
Needle injections, which were once the only option in treating advanced back-of-the-eye problems like age-related macular degeneration, may also become obsolete in the future because of his work. The injections are often painful and can cause hemorrhaging and retinal damage, but Mitra's new application method is non-invasive and harmless.
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