Delivery mechanism in development for posterior segment drugs

A method of delivering therapies into the posterior segment is being sought by researchers at Kansas State University.

Delores Takemoto, PhD, and colleagues are developing a drug to prevent the spread of damage from cell to cell in the eye, but one of the problems that must be solved first is the method of delivering the drug, she said in a press release from the university.

“One of the things we’re working on is a delivery mechanism to put things into the eye,” said Dr. Takemoto, a professor of biochemistry at Kansas State. “Any time you stick a needle into the eye, you can get a retinal detachment. [We] have to continue to find ways to get things past that blood-ocular barrier. ... We know how to treat things; it’s just getting it into the eye without having to inject it.”

The team’s research, which is supported by two grants from the National Eye Institute, focuses on protein gap junctions that connect cells in the eye, according to the press release.

Cell damage spreads when a gap junction connects one damaged cell to another cell, Dr. Takemoto explained. The damage can lead to severe eye damage and even blindness if the gap junctions are not closed.

“What we’re working on is ways to close that gap junction and prevent that spread,” Dr. Takemoto said in the press release. “What you have to do is design chemicals that will hit those proteins and make them close instead of having them open.”

The researchers’ current concern is how to deliver the chemical across the blood-ocular barrier, according to the press release.

“The eye and the brain [have] what we call a blood-brain barrier or a blood-ocular barrier,” Dr. Takemoto said. “The blood supply in the rest of the body doesn’t mix with the blood supply in the rest of the brain or the eye.”

Injections into the bloodstream will not travel into the eye, she said.

Other members of the Kansas State research team include Profs. Harriet Davidson, John Tomich and Larry Takemoto.