Since his university years at the Faculty of Pharmacy, Dr. Ibrahim El Sherbiny, the founding director of the Nano Science Program at the Zewail City of Science and Technology in Egypt, has been preoccupied with observing that most of the content of eye drops is wasted when used, with the eye benefiting from only 3 to 5% of the content at best.
El Sherbiny was not the first to seek a solution to this problem, as research teams around the world had been working on providing practical alternatives to eye drops, such as therapeutic contact lenses or gel or rapidly dissolvable eye pellets. However, the challenges that prevented the popularity of those alternatives renewed the interest of the seasoned El Sherbiny, until he recently succeeded in finding a solution through nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology is the field where materials become part of a billionth of a meter, and at this precise size, all their traditional properties change. Thus, it’s possible to introduce new generations of materials with extraordinary properties that were not present in traditional materials.
The solution presented by El Sherbiny, published in the journal “Future Medicine,” involved imbuing some fibers with extraordinary properties to produce nanoscale pellets loaded with “Azithromycin” medication, known for its use as an antimicrobial. These pellets were then placed on a patch not exceeding “2 millimeters by 3 millimeters” in size and approximately 100 microns thick.
These patches are adhered under the lower eyelid, aided by the mucous material of the eyelid, allowing slow release of the drug into the eye with uniform distribution across the entire area.
While this invention may seem simple, it represents a model of the value of “nanotechnology,” which could be the driving force behind the economies of developing countries, as El Sherbiny states in an interview with “Al Jazeera Net” in his office at Zewail City.
El Sherbiny points to a board in front of him filled with summaries of his published research, saying, “Each research idea based on nanotechnology represented here can be leveraged to achieve millions of dollars in economic income.”
As I expressed my evident fascination, El Sherbiny continued, opening one of the books on his desk: “This page from the book talks about the drug Doxorubicin for cancer treatment, which had huge problems until it was produced using nanotechnology, renamed as Doxil. The producing company succeeded in making millions in profits, not because it invented a new drug, but because it developed it; it didn’t invent a new drug.”
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