The cornea is no stranger to innovation and research – an incredible amount of time, effort and money has been invested in refractive surgery R&D over the years, and such procedures are almost uniformly safe and successful. But there’s more to the cornea than being a refractive surface that’s ripe for ablation – it’s the site of many diseases, from ocular surface disorders to endothelial dystrophies and everything in between. Treatment strategies span everything from excimer and femtosecond laser interventions, UV illumination combined with riboflavin application, stem cells, to even the topical administration fungal isolates like ciclosporin.
So what’s next? To find out where clinical research into dry eye has been focused, and where ongoing clinical trials might take the field, we performed an analysis of dry eye clinical trials on clinicaltrials.gov.
We searched clinicaltrials.gov for: “cornea,” and analyzed the data in Microsoft Excel 2013. Inappropriate records were excluded, and the full text of each record examined for additional details to be recorded into the spreadsheet.
I spent seven years as a medical writer, writing primary and review manuscripts, congress presentations and marketing materials for numerous – and mostly German – pharmaceutical companies. Prior to my adventures in medical communications, I was a Wellcome Trust PhD student at the University of Edinburgh.
