Retinal detachment is a serious eye condition that affects people of all ages. If left untreated, retinal detachment results in blindness, with its incidence rising worldwide due to an increase in diabetes causing ocular complications.
To treat complex retinal detachments, vitreoretinal surgery is performed in which the vitreous body of the eye is removed and an implant, known as a retinal tamponade, is inserted to hold the retina in place until reattachment occurs over a period of three to six months.
There are around 80,000 cases of retinal detachment every year in Europe alone, with around one in four patients treated with a silicone oil tamponade agent which can cause emulsification and significant clinical complications such as cloudy vision, inflammation and glaucoma. However, the use of methods to address this issue created the strong need for new oils that display ease of injection, high resistance to emulsification, as well as a trend towards the use of finer gauge needles to minimise surgical incision size and thereby reduce eye trauma.
Our multidisciplinary team of researchers with combined expertise from across bioengineering, colloid science, complex fluids, rheology, and vitreoretinal surgery, took on this challenge to collaboratively develop a strategy to modify the material properties of the oils by increasing their extensional viscosity.
The research team engineered a novel composition by adding a high molecular weight silicone polymer to a low viscosity silicone oil to change its rheological properties and increase extensional viscosity.
This resulted in the production of a novel silicone oil with a clinically appropriate shear viscosity and a higher emulsification resistance than existing oils.
Further development, in collaboration with German medical devices company Fluoron GmbH, produced a product with an even higher emulsification resistance that is still injectable. These oil combinations allowed rapid injection through fine gauge surgical needles to help reduce eye trauma.
The same principle was applied to the production of a ‘heavy’ tamponade using a combination of silicone oil, semi-fluorinated alkanes and a high molecular weight silicone polymer.
The products were launched in Europe by the University of Liverpool patent technology-licensee Fluoron GmbH and are currently sold in around 40 countries worldwide. Since 2014, the novel tamponade agents developed by our researchers have been used to treat over 77,000 retinal detachment patients around the world.
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