UMKC doctor brings future of eye treatment into focus

By: Greg Vandas

Posted: 10/13/08

Visual ailments once difficult to treat have now met their match thanks to the pioneering work of one of UMKC's esteemed medical researchers.

Dr. Ashim K. Mitra, Ph.D., the University of Missouri Curators' Professor of Pharmacy and chairman of UMKC's division of Pharmaceutical Sciences, recently developed a number of new ways to heal the human eye, replacing the former technological front-runners with more efficient and less painful treatments.

Motivated by the need for a clean and accurate method of delivering medicine to the back of the eye, Mitra invented liquid eye drops that are applied directly under the eyelid rather than on to the eyeball itself. The medication then utilizes the eye's blood vessels to get to the retina, a delicate, light-sensitive membrane lining the inner eyeball that has been increasingly plagued by disease and disorder in Americans.

"In the past, pharmacologists mainly looked [to treat] the front of the eye, but with the increasing number of diseases affecting the back of the eye, attention has now been focused there," Mitra said. "I realized, too, that something needed to be done to tackle this problem."

Once Mitra's drops reach the back of the eye, though, they encounter the eye's natural defenses, a system of efflux pumps that siphons out foreign material - including medicines.

But he has bypassed these chemical security measures, too.

By combining the medicine with an essential nutrient the eye cannot reject, as well as a steroid such as prednisone, he discovered he can "fool" the efflux pumps into allowing the medicine to pass.

Mitra's solution takes the place of old-fashioned topical eye drops, a widely-acknowledged nuisance because of their tendency to run out of the eye upon contact, causing most of the medicine to be lost.

Needle injections, which were once the only option in treating advanced back-of-the-eye problems like age-related macular degeneration, may also become obsolete in the future because of his work. The injections are often painful and can cause hemorrhaging and retinal damage, but Mitra's new application method is non-invasive and harmless.

The scientific revolution does not end there. Mitra also invented a gelatinous polymer that, when combined with his drug, operates on a subatomic level to substantially increase the drug's local effectiveness.

Time-release capabilities are made possible because the polymer can maintain the presence of drugs in the eye for months, allowing patients to apply the drops less often.

As a result, Mitra believes the final cost of his treatment will be significantly lower than costs for other options, although no figures have been officially determined.

On the contrary, the scope of his cure is expected to be greater than that of any previous method.

"For now, we are just treating about 20 to 30 patients [with the medicine]," he said, "but we hope to soon complete the patent process, and then be able to treat hundreds of patients."

Diseases specifically targeted by Mitra's research include cytomegalovirus retinitis and a variety of macular problems.

Dr. Mitra graduated from Jadavpur University in Calcutta, India in 1974, earned a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Kansas in 1983 and taught at Purdue University before coming to UMKC's School of Pharmacy in 1994. His current research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and private organizations.

gvandas@unews.com