SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) project will be the development of a testing system that will facilitate glaucoma drug development in a more cost-effective manner. This will enable better treatment of glaucoma and ultimately prevention of vision loss. This work will overcome a major limiting factor for glaucoma drug discovery, and provide scientists and doctors with a unique tool to understand the physiology of the human eye as related to glaucoma. Commercially, this project will allow for high-throughput testing of new glaucoma therapies, making this technology highly desirable to the pharmaceutical industry. Longer term, this technology has the potential to provide a healthy transplantable tissue that can cure glaucoma. This STTR Phase I project proposes to address the lack of effective in vitro model for testing targeted glaucoma therapies. This work will be the first-of-its-kind, exploring the feasibility to bioengineer a physiologically-relevant 3D human trabecular outflow tract utilizing co-culture and cell differentiation methods along with microfabrication techniques. It is based on the development of a custom-built system that will incorporate the bioengineered tissue into a platform that mimics the flow of aqueous humor and pressure changes in the human eye. At the conclusion of this project, it is anticipated that the bioengineered tissue will behave similarly to its in vivo counterpart, and be usable as higher throughput testing platform for drugs affecting the outflow physiology of the human trabecular outflow tract. In addition, this project will lead to a platform that could be used by other scientists to study and understand the biology of the human trabecular outflow tract.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is the development of a drug screening system that will accelerate drug discovery for several eye diseases, including glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and macular edema. This technology will fulfill unmet needs of small and large biopharmaceutical companies engaged in drug discovery for various eye diseases by reducing development cost, expediting preclinical research, and increasing the chances of clinical success. From the socio-economic standpoint, this technology will result in the development of more effective ocular drugs that will decrease eye disease treatment cost. Furthermore, this model will facilitate more rapid development of technologies for the diagnosis of glaucoma and new surgical techniques in the management of this disease. Overall, this screening system will accelerate the development of medications for eye diseases, enhancing the quality of life for millions of people.This SBIR Phase II project will address the lack of effective models for testing targeted glaucoma therapeutics and additional ocular diseases. Currently, none of the available glaucoma medications target the eye tissue responsible for this disease due to absence of clinically relevant testing platform that incorporates this particular eye tissue. Presently, animal or human cadaver eyes are used to study and test the effects of medications on such tissue, however, these preparations are cumbersome and expensive. The proposed work will be the first-of-its-kind to engineer physiologically-relevant 3D human eye tissues utilizing novel cell culture methods along with microfabrication techniques and a microfluidic system. These 3D tissues will facilitate the development of disease-relevant in vitro model systems for understanding not only glaucoma but also diabetic retinopathy and macular edema pathology. This tool will help increase the success rate of glaucoma and ocular vasculature-related medications at later stages of drug development pipeline.