On the road

We're off to India! This promises to be an exciting and informative trip, and while it is really hard to say goodbye to Aricca and the kids, I'm already nervous that we're not going to be on the ground long enough. Time will tell, but I'm prepped for a whirlwind tour.

Pictures of the bus ride to Logan airport are not exciting, so instead I'll answer the question "So why are we going?"

Approximately 15 children in India are born with anophthalmia (missing an eye) or microphthalmia (having a very small eye) each day. As a result, as the children grow, the bony structure around the eye does not grow normally, leading to an asymmetrical face. Health problems can also ensue, including problems with development of structures such as the sinus. While there is no cure for this condition, children are typically provided with a series of increasingly large implantable "conformers" over time to increase the size of the socket and prepare it for a prosthetic eye. This is expensive and requires the child to be seen by a physician frequently during skeletal development.

In India, many of the children with this condition neither have access to regular visits, nor the resources to afford such treatment. I first learned of this problem last summer during a meeting with a surgeon from the Aravind Eye Clinic in Madurai. Aravind is much better known for their work in decreasing barriers to obtaining care for cataract surgery, but it turns out that they treat the majority, if not all of the children on the subcontinent with this condition, and many conditions.

Remarkably, Aravind provides free treatment for approximately 75% of its patients. As a result, their development group, Aurolab, asked Dartmouth to partner on a project in which our students would develop a medical device to treat patients with anaopthalmia/microphthalmia that has a low-cost, is of high quality, and requires only one surgical procedure; The state of the art is either too expensive or requires multiple surgeries.

Three of my students have been working as a team since October on this problem, and we are now ready to share our preliminary results with our partners. The students have synthesized a hydrogel sphere that expands over time (think "magic dinosaur toy that, when placed in water, expands to three times it's original size), and we're preparing for mechanical characterization and biocompatibility testing in a few weeks. Early in the fall, we connected with Dr. Michael Zegans from the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical center, who agreed to serve as our surgeon-advisor, as well as our guide and professional counselor during our first visit.

We're therefore bound for Boston on a bus, and will travel for the next several days to reach the Aravind Eye Clinic. With any luck, the story on this page will become richer, and the pictures will be more exciting than the Boston traffic (not shown).

Thank you to Amanda, Chris, and Elizabeth for much of the data and some of the text used for this post.