Vision Research Foundation, Sankara Nethralaya on Monday, signed a memorandum of understanding with Nichi-in Centre for Regenerative Medicine, an Indo-Japanese joint venture organisation, to pursue collaborative research in the treatment of viral diseases.

Viral diseases of the eye and other organs pose a major threat to health and the key to a solution lies with antiviral agents. The efficacy of antiviral agents has to be tested in laboratory models where the diseases 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.

H.N. Madhavan, president, VRF, who is also the principal investigator of the study, says several viral strains for which there is no proper laboratory model available, could be isolated in cell cultures cultivated and multiplied with NCRM's nano-polymer scaffold technology.