19 Sep 11, Chennai.Vision Research Foundation,SankaraNethralaya, a Chennai based Super specialty institute for ophthalmology has signed a MoU today with Nichi-In Centre for Regenerative Medicine (NCRM) an Indo Japan joint venture organization to pursue collaborative research on finding solutions for treatment to viral diseases.

Viral diseases of the eye and other organs pose a major threat to health and the key issue in solving the same lies with antiviral agents. The efficacy of antiviral agents has to be tested in laboratory models where the disease causing viruses themselves are grown and various antiviral agents are tried at different doses to choose the appropriate one that will curtail the specific virus.

NCRM, has been working jointly with Japanese institutes and has come out with several nano-polymer scaffolds which have great potentials for growing the viruses in the lab in a healthy manner. In these scaffolds, the anti-viral agents could be tried to find out the right agent and dosage for controlling the viruses following which the same could be tried in translational settings.

According to Dr Madhavan, Principal investigator of the study, several viral strains for which we do not have a proper laboratory model, could be isolated in cell cultures cultivated in the polymer and multiplied with this technology. Thereby optimal solutions could be arrived at which will help us treat not only the viral diseases of the eye but also that in other specialties.