Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Understanding social media discussions about female genital mutilation

PLOS

Conversations on social media about female genital mutilation (FGM) have not changed dramatically over the five years to 2020, according to an analysis of English Twitter data, though there was a shift from raising awareness to calling for an end to the practice. Earlier on, users discussing the topic were mainly from the USA and UK, but later the majority came from Nigeria and Kenya. The research, published in PLOS Global Public Health, may be useful in informing communication and designing culturally effective campaigns against FGM.

At least 200 million women and girls living in 30 countries have undergone FGM despite it being illegal in almost all of the countries where it happens. FGM can lead to short- and long-term health consequences such as hemorrhage, shock, chronic infections, sexual health challenges and obstetric complications and poor mental health outcomes.

Gray Babbs and Sarah E. Weber of Boston University School of Public Health and colleagues analyzed social media discussion between 2015 and 2020 to assess sentiments, knowledge and attitudes about FGM over time. Surveys do not always elicit truthful answers, and the perceived anonymity of social media can bring private conversations into the public sphere.

They saw increases in conversation related to five news stories in the study period: when stricter laws were set in Eritrea, when the practice was outlawed in Egypt and banned in The Gambia and Sudan, and when a doctor was charged in the USA with performing FGM. Although it is not associated with any one religious group, Islam was associated with FGM in all years studied, with some individuals using FGM to justify Islamophobia and connecting it to other practices like honor killings and acid attacks.

There was a shift over time from awareness raising to explicit calls to end FGM. This aligned with movement-based language in the later period, tying FGM to feminism and human rights struggles. Using Twitter data in this way allows public health workers to listen to public discourse, understand perceptions, and develop appropriate communications and effective interventions.

The authors add: “We observed a 17-fold increase in daily FGM conversations on International Day of Zero Tolerance. This suggests there might be opportunity for using social media to educate the public about the FGM practice on or around International Day of Zero Tolerance.”

#####

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Global Public Health: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0000878

Citation: Babbs G, Weber SE, Abdalla SM, Cesare N, Nsoesie EO (2023) Use of machine learning methods to understand discussions of female genital mutilation/cutting on social media. PLOS Glob Public Health 3(7): e0000878. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0000878

Author Countries: US

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

JOURNAL

PLOS Global Public Health

DOI

10.1371/journal.pgph.0000878

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Use of machine learning methods to understand discussions of female genital mutilation/cutting on social media

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Jul-2023

Shedding light on a dark problem

ASU research delivers UV-C in a novel way to defeat bacteria in tight spaces

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

Testing UV light through side-emitting optical fibers (SEOFs) — IMAGE: TESTING UV LIGHT THROUGH SIDE-EMITTING OPTICAL FIBERS (SEOFS): (A) WESTERHOFF AND HIS TEAM CREATED AN EXPERIMENTAL SETUP FOR GROWING BIOFILM ON AN INCONEL PLATE COUPON WITH IRRADIATION FROM SEOFS DELIVERING UV-A, -B, OR -C FROM AN LED OR A CONTROL REACTOR WITH SEOFS NOT CONNECTED TO A UV-LED. (B) EXPERIMENTAL IRRADIANCE WAS MEASURED AT DIFFERENT DISTANCES AWAY FROM AND ALONG THE LENGTH OF THE SEOF. (C) INTEGRATED SPATIAL LIGHT IRRADIANCE WAS MEASURED FROM ALL THREE PARALLEL SEOFS IN THE REACTOR. GRAPHIC COURTESY OF PAUL WESTERHOFF/ASU view more
CREDIT: PAUL WESTERHOFF / ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

Bacterial biofilms are clusters of microorganisms that form on wetted surfaces virtually everywhere. They harbor pathogens that compromise water quality, and they can disrupt the operation of many different engineered systems through the corrosion, fouling and clogging of tanks, pipes and valves.

In some settings, they could even be deadly. Space suits that enable crew operations outside of the International Space Station use recirculating water to regulate body temperatures in the orbital extremes of full sun (250 F) and full shade (-250 F). But biofilms blooming in those water lines have nearly compromised astronaut safety during spacewalks.

Ultraviolet, or UV, light offers an effective, chemical-free means of controlling this problem by damaging the DNA and enzyme repair systems of microbes—which leads to their demise. But the UV lamps commonly used for disinfecting water bring the risk of hazardous material leaks because they are mercury-based. Additionally, their designs are not practical for narrow-diameter tubing and other tight spaces where biofilms are likely to grow.

Seeking a practical solution, Arizona State University researchers collaborated with the start-up company H2Optic Insights to develop a novel method of using UV light, specifically shorter-wavelength UV-C, to inhibit biofilm growth in almost any space. The results of their work are published in the July issue of the journal Nature Water.

“Ultraviolet light has been extensively studied for its ability to deactivate bacteria and microorganisms in water,” said Paul Westerhoff, the corresponding author of the paper and a professor of civil and environmental engineering in ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. “But there is limited research on its effectiveness against bacteria in established biofilms, and a key challenge in biofilm research using UV-C light is delivering light effectively to surfaces in pressurized water systems.”

Westerhoff and his team overcame this challenge by using LEDs connected to thin, side-emitting optical fibers, or SEOFs, placed directly on surfaces where biofilms can develop. The team successfully inhibited biofilm growth by delivering UV-C light through SEOFs at wavelengths of 265 or 275 nanometers and at low irradiance levels, just above a threshold of 9 µW/cm2.

The study also considered the impact of different UV wavelengths on biofilm inhibition, revealing that UV-A and UV-B had negligible effects at low irradiance levels where UV-C was effective. Westerhoff and his team further demonstrated that intermittent cycling of UV-C—with 10 minutes of irradiation followed by 50 minutes of dark time—achieved results comparable to continuous light exposure. That meant reducing energy use by more than 80%.

“From a design perspective, SEOFs offer a flexible solution for effectively illuminating extensive surface areas within narrow pipes or irregularly shaped surfaces,” said Westerhoff, who also is deputy director of the National Science Foundation Nanosystems Engineering Research Center on Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment, or NEWT. “This can be achieved using either a single SEOF or multiple SEOFs integrated into mesh designs.”

He said SEOFs also have the potential to revolutionize the design of apparatus for biofilm control since they can deliver UV at any wavelengths to surfaces where biofilms can develop and without the need to account for complications like light absorption or scattering through water, which would be a concern when using a point source LED to illuminate a surface.

“Using UV-C LEDs with SEOFs shows real promise in combating biofilms in water systems, particularly in enclosed and flowing water systems where traditional light delivery methods are limited,” said Westerhoff. “So, these findings contribute to improving the safety, performance and energy efficiency of water treatment systems, including in challenging environments like the International Space Station.”

Westerhoff said further research is required to explore how biofilms at various stages of development respond to UV light of different wavelengths. There also is a need to optimize the UV-SEOF method for different applications, such as biomedical devices and energy systems.

Other authors of the Nature Water paper are Zhe Zhao, Nora Shapiro, François Perreault and Bruce Rittmann—all from ASU—as well as Hojung Rho from the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology and Li Ling from the Advanced Interdisciplinary Institute of Environment and Ecology at Beijing Normal University.

JOURNAL

Nature Water

DOI

10.1038/s44221-023-00111-7

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Biofilm inhibition on surfaces by ultraviolet light side-emitted from optical fibres

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

10-Jul-2023

COI STATEMENT

P.W., Z.Z. and N.S. are authors on a patent application for side-emitting optical fibers; P.W. is co-owner of a company (H2Optic Insights LLC) aiming to commercialize the side-emitting optical fiber technology. The other authors declare no competing interests.

Scientists develop tool to predict dam removal costs by analyzing 55 years of past removals

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

Glines Canyon dam removal — IMAGE: GLINES CANYON DAM REMOVAL ON SEPT. 3, 2014. view more
CREDIT: JEFF DUDA, USGS.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Scientists analyzed more than 650 dam removal projects over 55 years in the United States totaling $1.52 billion inflation-adjusted dollars to develop a tool to better estimate the cost of future dam removals.

The analysis arrives at a time of increasing awareness of the disruptive impact dams can have on ecosystems, while thousands of dams are increasingly being removed because they are aging, unsafe, no longer serving their original purpose or in need of costly repairs and maintenance.

“We are transitioning from a period of building dams to one that includes removing dams,” said Jeffrey Duda, a research ecologist with U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Fisheries Research Center. “But estimating costs of removing dams is a challenge, which makes it difficult to weigh when dam removal may be a viable alternative.”

Duda and scientists from the USGS, Oregon State University, the Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the University of Georgia, begin to unravel those challenges in a paper just published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

“The results help us get beyond the common perception of ‘every dam removal is different,’” said Desiree Tullos, a water resources engineer at Oregon State. “That’s still true, but these databases give us a sense of the common and divergent features of dam removals across the U.S.

“When working through detailed costs with practitioners, we found that height isn’t always the best predictor of cost. Other factors like site restoration, mitigation of potential negative impacts of dam removal and sediment management can be major cost drivers, and those are often dependent on the preferences of local regulators and interested parties.”

The number of dams removed in the United State has increased significantly the past 50 years. For four 10-year periods beginning in 1976 and ending in 2015, the number of dams removed jumped from 45 to 139 to 313 to 637, according to past research by Duda, Tullos and others.

Now, as part of the 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the federal government is awarding $733 million for dam safety projects, including dam removals. A recent estimate predicted that by 2050 between 4,000 and 32,000 more dams will be removed in the United States.

For the new paper, the researchers compiled reported costs for 668 dams removed from 1965 to 2020 in the United States. When adjusted for inflation into 2020 dollars, the projects totaled $1.52 billion dollars.

They divided the dams removed into three height categories: less than 5 meters, between 5 and 10 meters and greater than 10 meters. The median cost respectively for the three categories was $157,000, $823,000 and $6.2 million.

They also analyzed geographic differences in dam removals. The northeast accounted for the most dam removals with 277, followed by the Midwest (222), Southwest (78), Northwest (50) and Southeast (41). More than 80% of the dams were five meters or less.

The Northwest accounted for the highest cost, totaling $775.8 million, more than triple the second-place Midwest. The cost in the Northwest is influenced by several recent large-scale projects on the Elwha and Clark Fork rivers in Washington and Montana.

The researchers also estimated the main cost drivers of dam removal. Dam height was the strongest predictor, followed by average river discharge and project complexity, which accounts for costs associated with construction and sediment management, mitigation for dam removal effects and post-removal outcomes like replanting vegetation in former reservoir surfaces. Regional differences and dam material were also significant but less important factors.

In the coming years, the researchers plan to incorporate additional data as new projects and reported costs become available, with a goal of further refining the predictive accuracy of a machine-learning model.

“The model is going to get better and better and further help decision-makers as they grapple with how to manage the large number of dams approaching obsolescence,” Duda said.

Other co-authors of the paper are Suman Jumani, Daniel Wieferich, S. Kyle McKay, Timothy Randle, Alvin Jansen, Susan Bailey, Benjamin L. Jensen, Rachelle Johnson, Ella Wagner, Kyla Richards, Seth Wenger, Eric Walther and Jennifer Bountry.

Tullos is affiliated with Oregon State’s colleges of engineering and agricultural sciences.

Regional cost estimates of dam removal by dam height category in the United States from 1965 to 2020.

CREDIT

Jeff Duda

JOURNAL

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution

Menstrual cups can help prevent infection, improve vaginal health

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS CHICAGO

Many girls in low- and middle-income countries struggle to buy products to manage their periods, which can cause them to skip school. So, ensuring they have access to menstrual products is critical.

A new Kenya-based study from University of Illinois Chicago researchers shows that the benefits of one kind of menstrual product — a menstrual cup — extend well beyond educational access. Teenage girls who were given menstrual cups were less likely to acquire certain kinds of vaginal infections and were more likely to have a healthy vaginal microbiome, the study found. The findings are published in PLOS Medicine.

The research, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, followed 436 Kenyan secondary school girls, half of whom were given menstrual cups. They were tested every six months for bacterial vaginosis, a common type of infection, and at 12 months and 30 months for sexually transmitted infections. The researchers also tested participants’ vaginal microbiome to determine the relative prevalence of beneficial and harmful bacteria.

At the end of the study, the girls with menstrual cups were 26% less likely to have bacterial vaginosis and were 37% more likely to have an optimal vaginal microbiome than the girls who didn’t receive a cup. Overall, the menstrual cups did not appear to lower the risk of sexually transmitted infections, but when the researchers controlled for confounding factors, such as age and whether the girls were sexually active, they did see a decrease in STIs among those using a menstrual cup.

“The results showed that menstrual cups could be a game-changer in helping keep girls healthy,” said Supriya Mehta, an adjunct professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in the School of Public Health at UIC and principal investigator on the study.

The study grew out of a conversation that Mehta had at a conference in Kenya in 2016 with Penelope Phillips-Howard, a professor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom. At the time, Phillips-Howard had conducted an initial randomized trial looking at whether menstrual cups were effective at keeping girls in Kenya in school. As part of the study, the team tested for bacterial vaginosis and sexually transmitted infections, and she mentioned to Mehta that their results thus far suggested that menstrual cups were reducing infections.

Mehta believed she knew why — because menstrual cups help maintain a healthy microbiome during menses. “If your vagina is healthy, then it’s more resilient to STI pathogens,” she explained.

With this hypothesis, Mehta and her coauthors were able to create a sub-study looking at the biological impact of menstrual cups that was nested within a larger study of 4,000 girls that Phillips-Howard was embarking upon.

There are a few reasons that menstrual cups are more beneficial to vaginal health than other menstrual products, Mehta explains. The cup, which is bell-shaped and made from medical-grade silicone, is inserted into the vagina, where it collects blood. Tampons, on the other hand, don’t take the blood out of the vaginal vault, and this iron-rich setting can be welcoming to the bacteria that cause bacterial vaginosis. The cups are also better than tampons at maintaining an acidic environment, which is a deterrent to infections. As for sanitary pads or reusable cloths that are worn too long or not cleaned properly, they can end up transferring bacteria into the vagina.

“These are all challenges that menstrual cups address,” Mehta said.

The study was conducted in Kenya because of the link between menstrual products and staying in school, and because of an additional potential benefit given that 10% of 15-year-olds there reported having exchanged sex for sanitary pads. Yet, Mehta sees the results as relevant in higher-income countries, too. She hopes the study is repeated elsewhere to assess these benefits. Beyond the health benefits for women in countries like the U.S., she also thinks menstrual cups would be particularly helpful for groups such as homeless women.

The researchers have received $2.6 million in additional NIH funding to continue this study for another year. Mehta is also launching a second study focused on sex workers in Kenya, which is a particularly vulnerable group. Because they can’t stop working when they are menstruating, they often engage in risky behaviors to manage their periods, have to charge less or don’t get paid at all. Mehta received a $3 million NIH grant to study the impact of giving sex workers menstrual cups, one style of which can be worn unobtrusively during sex.

Other researchers on the study include Stefan Green, formerly of UIC, and Runa Bhaumik, research assistant professor in the College of Medicine at UIC, who is co-investigator of the sex worker study.

Written by Emily Stone

JOURNAL

PLoS Medicine

DOI

10.1371/journal.pmed.1004258

ARTICLE TITLE

Analysis of bacterial vaginosis, the vaginal microbiome, and sexually transmitted infections following the provision of menstrual cups in Kenyan schools: Results of a nested study within a cluster randomized controlled trial

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Jul-2023

Soil microbes help plants cope with drought, but not how scientists thought

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURAL, CONSUMER AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Kevin Ricks — IMAGE: A UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS RESEARCH TEAM, INCLUDING KEVIN RICKS (PICTURED), DETERMINED FREE-LIVING SOIL MICROBES DON'T RESPOND TO PLANTS' CRIES FOR HELP DURING DROUGHT. RATHER, THEY ADAPT TO DROUGHT ON THEIR OWN AND INCIDENTALLY PROVIDE BENEFITS. view more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

URBANA, Ill. — There’s a complex world beneath our feet, teeming with diverse and interdependent life. Plants call out with chemical signals in times of stress, summoning microbes that can unlock bound nutrients and find water in soil pores too small for the finest roots. In return, microbes get a safe place to live or a sugary drink.

It’s a classic you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours scenario. Except when it’s not. New research from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign challenges conventional wisdom to show free-living soil microbes are just looking out for themselves.

In a multi-generation experiment, researchers from the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) found microbes helped plants cope with drought, but not in response to plants’ cries for help. Instead, the environment itself selected for drought-tolerant microbes. And while those hardy microbes were doing their thing, they just happened to make plants more drought-tolerant, too.

“It was a surprise because I expected to see evidence of coevolution and mutualism between the microbes and plants. I think people, myself included, forget that just because microbes do something adaptive or beneficial to the plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re doing it for the plant,” said Kevin Ricks, who completed the project as part of his doctoral degree in the Program for Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology at Illinois. Ricks is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto.

To learn how microbes help plants deal with drought, Ricks established live soil communities in pots with or without plants. He watered half of the pots well and imposed drought conditions in the other half, then repeated these treatments for three generations. The idea was to allow time for selection to occur — potentially for plants to signal their need for help and select for microbes that came to their aid.

In phase two of the experiment, Ricks mixed everything up. He again grew plants in soil from phase one and kept the same watering treatments, but some plants were now experiencing drought in soils that had been well-watered for generations, and vice versa. He expected soil microbes from historically dry pots would have adapted to those conditions, helping plants withstand drought more than microbes from historically wet pots. And that is what he found: Plants experiencing drought were bigger when grown with drought-adapted microbes.

But — and this is key — that was true for soils grown with or without plants in phase one. In other words, microbes adapted to drought over time even without plants selecting for them through chemical signals. Yet they still provided benefits when grown with plants generations later. It was proof these microbes were doing their own thing, only helping plants incidentally.

No previous studies on the topic had included a no-plant control, leaving the research community to conclude plants and microbes were communicating in a co-evolutionary dialogue.

“Our results challenge classical thinking about what counts as a mutual benefit. Mycorrhizae and nitrogen-fixing bacteria are kind of model systems, things that people study when they talk about mutualism. But then there's this fuzzier set of interactions that we don't understand yet, but could still wind up having a mutual benefit, or at least a one-way benefit to the plant. I think our approach brings this system into the spotlight,” said co-author Tony Yannarell, associate professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, part of the College of ACES at Illinois.

The researchers also sterilized some phase-one soils before imposing treatments in phase two. In those pots, plants in historically dry soils were no better off when experiencing drought.

“Some previous studies didn't actually compare soil with and without microbes, so it's hard to really implicate the microbes as the driver of the benefit,” Yannarell said. “There are a lot of things that could have been different in the soil, but when we sterilized the microbes away in our experiment, we lost the benefit of the drought adaptation.”

The researchers didn’t identify the microbes in their experiment, so they can’t be sure exactly how they were benefiting plants. But Ricks said soil microbes are involved in many processes that could help plants withstand stress.

“Microbes are responsible for nutrient and carbon cycling, so whether or not they’re actually facilitating plant access to water, they could still be freeing up nutrients that make the plant healthier and more resilient to stress,” he said.

Ricks hesitated to claim his study will shift paradigms in ecological research, especially considering it was a greenhouse experiment focused on free-living soil microbes and a single type of environmental stress. But he hopes it will encourage other scientists to consider no-microbe and no-plant controls in future studies. They might just reveal what’s really going on beneath our feet.

The study, “Soil moisture incidentally selects for microbes that facilitate locally adaptive plant response,” is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B [DOI:10.1098/rspb.2023.0469]. This research is a contribution of the GEMS Biology Integration Institute, funded by the National Science Foundation DBI Biology Integration Institutes Program, [award #2022049]. It was additionally supported by the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under project number ILLU 875–952, as well as by the School of Integrative Biology and the Graduate College at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

JOURNAL

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

DOI

10.1098/rspb.2023.0469

IT peer advice may diminish the management labor pool

Study finds that business students are discouraged by their IT peers to pursue careers in the field

Peer-Reviewed Publication

RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE

It is only natural that, when students consider career options, they ask friends, family, and colleagues in their prospective fields for advice. They may hear about job opportunities, wage expectations, career paths, hiring processes, and more. In the end, that information may inspire and excite, or it may turn students off from the field entirely.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Nishtha Langer, Ph.D., associate professor of business analytics at the Lally School of Management, investigated how peers in information technology (IT) influence management students’ choices to pursue careers in the IT industry. Her research, conducted with the help of Tarun Jain of the Indian Institute of Management, yielded surprising results.

“Analyzing students at a leading business school in India, we find that having peers who have worked in IT reduces the likelihood of receiving and accepting an offer in the IT industry,” Langer said. “If a student has no IT experience, however, IT peers ameliorate this effect to a certain degree.”

The findings are significant given the necessity of IT for firms in terms of productivity, cost savings, and adding value, combined with firms’ struggles with IT management talent recruitment. IT managers play critical roles in firms’ strategies, marketing and sales, and project management.

“We usually expect that peers with experience in a certain industry would encourage business school students to enter that industry, but, instead, our research points to the opposite effect,” Langer said. “So, managers who want to use peer-to-peer learning to train workers should be aware that negative messages could be transmitted along with positive ones.”

On the other hand, Langer and Jain found that the students most likely to receive positive messaging and pursue careers in IT happen to be women without IT experience.

“If tech companies are listening, they should note that the spillover effect of equitable policies may reap more diverse managers because women listen to other women’s experiences,” Langer said.

“The findings of Dr. Langer and Dr. Jain are valuable for firms as they strategize around IT management talent recruitment and workforce development,” said Chanaka Edirisinghe, acting dean of Rensselaer’s Lally School of Management. “It is also important to note that different strategies may be more effective among different demographics.”

About Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute:

Founded in 1824, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is America’s first technological research university. Rensselaer encompasses five schools, over 30 research centers, more than 140 academic programs including 25 new programs, and a dynamic community made up of over 6,800 students and 110,000 living alumni. Rensselaer faculty and alumni include upwards of 155 National Academy members, six members of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, six National Medal of Technology winners, five National Medal of Science winners, and a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. With nearly 200 years of experience advancing scientific and technological knowledge, Rensselaer remains focused on addressing global challenges with a spirit of ingenuity and collaboration. To learn more, please visit www.rpi.edu.

For general inquiries: newsmedia@rpi.edu

Visit the Rensselaer research and discovery blog: https://everydaymatters.rpi.edu/

###

JOURNAL

Information Systems Research

DOI

10.1287/isre.2019.0416

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Peer Influence and IT Career Choice

Healing power of light: University of Ottawa team advances clear vision for eye repair

With potential to impact millions, study finds that biomimetic materials pulsed with low-energy blue light can reshape damaged corneas, including thickening the tissue.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA

An injectable biomaterial activated by pulses of low-energy blue light has tremendous potential for on-the-spot repair to the domed outer layer of the eye, a team of University of Ottawa researchers and their collaborators have revealed.

Guided by biomimetic design—innovation inspired by nature—the multidisciplinary researchers’ compelling results show that a novel light-activated material can be used to effectively reshape and thicken damaged corneal tissue, promoting healing and recovery.

This technology is a potential game-changer in corneal repair; tens of millions of people across the globe suffer from corneal diseases and only a small fraction are eligible for corneal transplantation. Transplant operations are the current gold standard for ailments resulting in thinning corneas such as keratoconus, a poorly understood eye disease that results in loss of vision for many people.

“Our technology is a leap in the field of corneal repair. We are confident this could become a practical solution to treat patients living with diseases that negatively impact corneal shape and geometry, including keratoconus,” says Dr. Emilio Alarcon, an Associate Professor at the uOttawa Faculty of Medicine and researcher at the BioEngineering and Therapeutic Solutions (BEaTS) group at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute.

The cornea is the protective, dome-like surface of the eye in front of the iris and pupil. It controls and directs light rays into the eye and helps achieve clear vision. It’s normally transparent. But injury or infection results in scarring of the cornea.

The collaborative team’s work was published in Advanced Functional Materials, a high-impact scientific journal.

The biomaterials devised and tested by the team are comprised of short peptides and naturally occurring polymers called glycosaminoglycans. In the form of a viscous liquid, the material gets injected within corneal tissue after a tiny pocket is surgically created. When pulsed with low-energy blue light, the injected peptide-based hydrogel hardens and forms into a tissue-like 3D-structure within minutes. Dr. Alarcon says this then becomes a transparent material with similar properties to those measured in pig corneas.

In vivo experiments using a rat model indicated that the light-activated hydrogel could thicken corneas without side effects. The research team – which employed a much smaller blue light dosage compared to what’s been used in other studies – also successfully tested the technology in an ex vivo pig cornea model. Testing in large animal models will be necessary prior to clinical human trials.

“Our material was engineered to harvest the blue light energy to trigger the on-the-spot assembling of the material into a cornea-like structure. Our cumulative data indicates that the materials are non-toxic and remain for several weeks in an animal model. We anticipate our material will remain stable and be non-toxic in human corneas,” says Dr. Alarcon, whose uOttawa lab focuses on developing new materials with regenerative capabilities for tissue of the heart, skin, and cornea.

The rigorous research took over seven years to reach the publication stage.

“We had to engineer each part of the components involved in the technology, from the light source to the molecules used in the study. The technology was developed to be clinically translatable, meaning all components must be designed to be ultimately manufacturable following strict standards for sterility,” Dr. Alarcon says.

The research findings are also the focus of a patent application, which is presently under negotiations for licensing.

Dr. Alarcon was the study’s senior author who guided the material design aspect of the research, while uOttawa’s Dr. Marcelo Muñoz and Aidan MacAdam played big roles in creating the novel technology. Interdisciplinary collaborators included Université de Montréal scientists Dr. May Griffith, an expert in cornea regeneration, and Dr. Isabelle Brunette, an ophthalmology and corneal transplant expert.

The project was supported by a Collaborative Health Research Projects grant, an NSERC Discovery grant, the Government of Ontario, and the University of Ottawa Heart Institute.

JOURNAL

Advanced Functional Materials

DOI

10.1002/adfm.202302721

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Low Energy Blue Pulsed Light-Activated Injectable Materials for Restoring Thinning Corneas