Team led by Indo-canadian develops novel glaucoma drop
TORONTO : A team of researchers led by an Indo-canadian professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) has developed a novel eyedrop using nanoparticles and a compound extracted from the marijuana plant that could optimise treatment for glaucoma in future.
The system takes a cannabis compound, cannabigerolic acid or CBGA, and places it inside nanoparticles that are infused into a hydrogel. Vikramaditya Yadav, professor of chemical and biological engineering, and biomedical engineering at UBC, is leading the project which he hopes will result in a product for patients by 2022.
Eyedrops are used to treat multiple ailments but, Yadav pointed out, one issue that plagues them is that nearly 95% of the medication doesn’t get properly absorbed.
The hydrogel containing the cannabinoid, which has proven efficacy in glaucoma control, forms a coating on the eye. Applied at bedtime, it goes to work as the patient sleeps, gradually dissolving and penetrating deep into the organ to deliver the medicine. “All 100% of it ends up translating inside the eye,” Yadav said in an interview.
His research team looked at the cannabinoid molecule and, in parallel, the drug delivery system. “The eye is quite a challenging environment because everything has to first go through the cornea, then the two chambers of the eye and then finally reach the back of the eye,” he said. The new system can efficiently reach the back of the eye and reduce the ocular pressure that causes damage in glaucoma, with severe cases leading to blindness.
The process facilitates “deep delivery of the drug”, with the nanoparticles acting “like miniaturised buses carrying the drug deep into the eye”.
Yadav’s team is using microbes to make the cannabinoid molecule since they “multiply several orders of magnitude faster” than plants do, thus allowing the team to “industrialise the manufacture of the molecule”.