SOVS Paper of the Week: We recently published a paper on our research with the team of Professor Rachel Williams, opens in a new window at the University of Liverpool, UK. Rachel and her team of Kyle Doherty and Rebecca Lace had been working on the concept of antimicrobial bandage contact lenses for some time.
During a visit to UNSW Sydney by Kyle and Rebecca, our team at UNSW School of Optometry and Vision Science started this collaboration which investigates the use of contact lenses made out of crossed-linked Poly‐ε‐Lysine alone or in combination with our antimicrobial peptide Mel4 bound to Poly‐ε‐Lysine to control adhesion of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to the lenses and to treat corneas infected by this bacterium.
The paper shows that Poly‐ε‐Lysine lenses alone or in combination with our Mel4 peptide reduced bacterial adhesion and resulted in much less bacteria infecting the corneas in an ex vivo model