‘The eyes have it’ in top health research career awards

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26 November 2013

‘The eyes have it’ in top health research career awards

Three of New Zealand’s talented, up-and-coming eye researchers will each receive up to $500,000 from the Health Research Council of New Zealand (HRC) to develop exciting new therapies for debilitating eye conditions such as cataracts and diseases of the cornea.

The trio and 11 other researchers have collectively been awarded more than $4.3 million through the HRC’s 2014 Career Development Awards programme. The HRC has also awarded a further 19 awards in the area of Māori health (worth a total of $1.5 million) and 10 awards for Pacific health research (worth a total of $1.09 million).

Eye surgeon and clinician Associate Professor Dipika Patel from The University of Auckland will use her HRC Clinical Practitioner Research Fellowship to further develop a new scaffold that could become a substitute for human corneal tissue. Ultimately, the scaffold would replace human donor corneas in transplant operations.

Donor corneal tissue is a limited resource in most countries. The current waiting time for cornea transplantation in New Zealand is more than a year. In many other countries, donor corneal tissue isn’t available.

“The development of a suitable tissue substitute would have a dramatic effect on reducing waiting times for surgical treatment and may enable treatment of corneal diseases that are not currently suitable for transplantation,” says Dr Patel.

If successful, she says this work will open up a wide range of avenues in the field of tissue engineering and reconstructive surgery.

Dr Angus Grey from The University of Auckland has received a Sir Charles Hercus Health Research Fellowship to tackle cataracts, the world’s most preventable form of blindness. Dr Grey will use his expertise in imaging mass spectrometry to discover what role small molecules and metabolites (substances produced during metabolism) play in the development of cataracts.

Each year some 16,000 cataract surgeries are performed in New Zealand.

Dr Grey says the research will provide the information needed to develop novel anti-cataract therapies that use nutritional supplements to delay the progression of the cataract on the eye’s lens.

University of Auckland eye specialist Dr Ilva Rupenthal plans to use her Sir Charles Hercus Health Research Fellowship to develop biodegradable eye implants that can slowly release medication for eye diseases over up to six months. Non-invasive laser light passed through the cornea will activate the implants to provide top-up doses of medication.

“These awards are a fantastic opportunity to help some of New Zealand’s best and brightest become world-class leaders in their fields, and to translate cutting-edge research from bench to bedside,” says HRC Chief Executive Dr Robin Olds.

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