Ocular drug treatment is usually accomplished as local drug administration, but many ocular tissues are difficult to reach with simple eye drop administration. Retinal disorders cause visual impairment and blindness in growing numbers of patients worldwide. Most retinal diseases do not have drug treatments yet and intravitreal injection is the only way to deliver drugs into the retina. New delivery approaches are needed to enable wide use of emerging retinal treatment modalities using less invasive routes of administration and long acting intraocular injections. Furthermore, new quantitative tools are needed to guide the design of ocular drug delivery systems.
Ocular drug delivery group operates at University of Helsinki and University of Eastern Finland (Kuopio Campus). Our research includes drug delivery system research, experimental ocular pharmacokinetics and -dynamics (PK/PD) and computational modeling.