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Current treatment of severe dry eye disease includes blood-derived eye drops, such as autologous serum, which lubricate the eyes and provide factors that improve ocular surface and aid in wound healing. A recent study investigated the efficacy and safety of plasma rich in growth factors (PRGF) eye drops in the management of patients with ocular surface diseases in North America.

In this exclusive 番茄社区 video, , director of the Foster Center for Ocular Immunology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and an American Academy of Ophthalmology Achievement Award winner, describes and discusses how his center is currently using the treatment.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

A very exciting thing we are doing is expanding the use of hematopoietic autologous blood products for the treatment of ocular surface disease, especially dry eye. Most of you are familiar with the use of serum tears. These are tears that are made from the serum of patients. A lot of published data on the use of this asset. It's safe, it works, and most of the time it's used for patients with severe dry eye. Now we've learning that we can use it in patients that have less symptoms, mild to moderate, to prevent progression and damage to the surface of the eye.

Dry eye is a disease of signs and symptoms, and hematopoietic blood products certainly help in the treatment of symptoms as well, as we hypothesize that they have neuropeptide and neuroprotective proteins that interact with corneal nerves and ocular surface nerves to minimize symptoms.

In the last 5 years, we've been evolving from using serum to using plasma, and the difference is that in plasma you have more growth factors. We call it PRGF, for platelet rich in growth factors tears. It's used primarily in patients that have orthopedic problems and dental problems. The orthopods and the dentists were using PRP [platelet-rich plasma] for many years, and we learned that we can make eye drops as well and use them in our patients.

Very exciting in the center. We've been collaborating with a group from Spain who developed a kit to develop and produce the plasma. Same thing -- patients come, we draw their blood, we separate the plasma instead of the serum, and in the plasma there are a lot of platelets that we activate and they release all these growth factors.

So it has become our main therapy right now, actually. It's safe, well tolerated, and very excitingly we just pulled our data from three major centers -- Bascom Palmer, Baylor, and ourselves here at Duke -- with my collaborators, Alfonso Sabater at Bascom Palmer, Steve Pflugfelder at Baylor University, and myself.

We looked at our data on the patients that were placed on, we call it PRGF or plasma drops, and very interesting and exciting, we show that in a significant number of eyes -- we looked at over almost 300 eyes -- we improved 198 patients. We actually improved both signs and symptoms of patients with dry eye disease.

We are very excited with this because it's a new avenue for the treatment of our patients, and we are now in the midst of talking to the National Eye Institute to see if they can sponsor a multicenter trial to validate the therapy to show efficacy in a randomized, multicenter mass trial in order to try to overcome the big hurdle, which is insurance coverage for this. We're hoping that if we can get an efficacy study that is safe, we can push the envelope for this.

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