Ocular diseases affect the quality of life of millions of patients. Despite some improvements, the arsenal of medications to treat severe ocular diseases today remains rather restricted to traditional drugs. Use of modern biotherapeutics, like proteins and nucleic acids, could be a major step forward. However, current ways of administration, such as eye drops and intravitreal injections, are no longer sufficient to deliver these drugs to most targets in the eye. Therefore, novel concepts allowing biotherapeutics to safely overcome ocular barriers are of high interest. In ocular surgery, pulsed-lasers (P-Ls) are used for ‘tissue cutting’ but safety concerns remain. Strategies allowing the use-of P-Ls at much lower energy
could considerably improve safety and pave the way for novel ocular therapies and surgical interventions. This project will explore vital dyes, as used by ocular surgeons to stain tissues, as photosensitizers. It follows our recent observation that P-L irradiation of ocular dyes results in the formation of water vapor nanobubbles (VNBs), a biophysical phenomenon that occurs at a very low laser energy. This project pursues to understand biophysical phenomena which occur upon exposing ocular dyes, encapsulated in nanoparticles, to pulsed-laser light and explore this knowledge for respectively delivery of nucleic acids in the corneal endothelium and for spatial selective vitreolysis in the eye.