Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects

Vision impairment often results from diabetes (proliferative diabetic retinopathy), affecting 500,000 Canadians (National Coalition for Vision Health). The annual Canadian health care costs of proliferative diabetic retinopathy are around one hundred million dollars (Statistic Canada). Current treatment options include laser ablation and vitrectomy, both use physical forces to remove overgrown blood vessels/blood clots in the eye. However, while up to 30% of patients received vitrectomy suffer from vision loss after 2 years of treatment, the long-term damages from the laser treatment have not been well understood. More recently, anti-angiogenic agents such as steroids and anti-growth factors, are proposed to treat advanced retinopathy. However, these agents need to be continually administered via regular intraocular injection using a needle and associated side-effects are retinal detachment, hemorrhage, and patient morbidity. Recently, docetaxel (an anticancer agent, DTX), has been identified as a powerful anti-angiogenic agent that inhibits capillary cell growth with minimal toxicity at the concentrations tested. We propose a magnetically controlled MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems) device to administer DTX such that both side effects and health care costs will be minimized as our continual, on-demand drug delivery device needs only to be administered once over a period of 6 months.