Abstract:

BACKGROUND: Tissue-engineered materials are rarely applied in ophthalmology, especially in ocular surface reconstruction. Most materials are still in animal testing, and there are many urgent problems.
OBJECTIVE: To assess the application of biodegradable materials in ophthalmology in order to find the rational ophthalmic materials.
METHODS: A computer-based search of Wanfang (http://www.wanfangdata.com.cn/) and PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed) was performed to retrieve articles published 1999-01/2009-12 addressing the clinical application of biodegradable materials in ophthalmology. The key words were “tissue engineering, ophthalmology, biomaterial” in Chinese and English. Repetitive articles and Meta analyses were excluded, and finally 17 articles were included in result analysis.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Biodegradable materials functioned as biological barriers can promote epithelial cell growth, inhibit fibroblast growth, reduce collagen synthesis, reduce surgical wound bleeding so as to prevent adhesion, as well as have antibacterial function, enhance immunity, and promote wound healing. Therefore, the biodegradable materials can be used alone to treat postoperative inflammation and fibrous proliferative lesions, and they can be also applied for eye surgery. With the further integration of biomedicine and materials science, the application of biodegradable materials is increasingly prevalent in ophthalmic research. It is conceivable that once the biodegradable materials are industrialized, they will have very broad application prospects in biomedicine.