PhD- A walk in the park?

[phdlatenighttalks-blog]

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse.. Well it just did!

Research? Yes! Save human lives? Double yes!

Anxiety? No!! Depression?? Excuse me! What are we talking about here? That’s not what I signed up for!

So how do you end up there? You start off thinking you will save the world. That you will make that one unprecedented discovery that will change the face of humanity. You spend sleepless nights thinking of a strategy reading every single paper that’s been published on the topic. And you believe you truly believe you will find that missing gap..

Till one day you check your calendar and realise it’s been two years you are half way through your program but you are nowhere close to what you set out to achieve! You question yourself, you doubt your capabilities to do it, and you even wonder if you are the right man for the job. You realise you have been too self-absorbed in your project you hardly saw what’s been happening around you. And you start to panic, you breathe heavily, you really sweat yourself out and you dread the end.  

Well the good news is, we have all been there. Every single PhD student whom I have come across had the same exact fall out at one point or the other and interestingly they’ve all agreed on one thing. You only seem to get solid results on the last year of your PhD. The reason why this tends to happen still remains a mystery but it happens every single time irrespective of the discipline! Maybe that should be a PhD thesis it would help a lot! But anyway that’s why I decided to chill out..

Do you want to hear a story about a series of unfortunate events happen to same exact person all at the same time? Well welcome to my world. Here’s a snap shot of what I’ve been through since I started off on this journey. I move to sunny (no so!) Glasgow leaving the beautiful beach and the warm sun of Alexandria, Egypt. My supervisor decides its time he leaves the university and settle somewhere else. But that’s fine I mean its not like I won’t survive right.. then my sponsoring company who has been in the market for 60 plus years gets taken over and were at the break point where we don’t know if the project is on or off till the new company decides if theyre shutting us down or not.. so I sit there and wait.. keeping my head low trying to stay busy the lab till we get a final verdict, they are keeping me on board.. now that’s a sigh of relief and its now time to go supervisor hunting.. and I do land on the perfect supervisor only he stops answering my emails and I cant seem to get a hold of him 2 months later I surrender the white flag and start hunting a new supervisor all over again.. in the meantime my first and only friend at that point decides to take his own life.. luckily enough he didn’t succeed but the mixture of lack of sunshine, being home sick, not knowing if my phd is still funded or not was way overwhelming for my taste..

And I rhetorically asked could it get any worse? Problems is when u tend to challenge life it takes it personal.. so ya it got worse.. both machines that I primarily work on decide to die and im in a the longest cue ever to get an engineer to look at them, my project shifted from a pharmacy degree to chemistry one – I mean chemistry is mean man.. and its june and still summer hasn’t decided to make its way through to sunny Glasgow!

[phdlatenighttalks-blog]

That unforgettable eye contact that you have made, that love at first sight that has turned your world upside down, those tears of happiness and joy that you’ve shed, that breath taking sunrise  that filled your existence with peace and awe, and many many more, all of which rely on a single pair.. You know them right? Your eyes!

Your eyes are your windows to the outside world; vision, seeing beauty, witnessing birth and life, allowing you to make mental images and memories of all of your experiences. But they are not just that they are far more. They are your first form of communication. They are your advocates when a million words seem to fail you. So how would you feel if someone turned off that light, if that light never came back on? How would you feel if you had to live in sheer darkness for the rest of your life?

Some of the major sight threatening diseases that affect the eye and consequently lead to blindness are those that affect the back of the eye which we call the posterior segment of the eye. With very limited access to the back of the eye due to its location and the requirement of very delicate and gentle handling delivering the right medication at the right time in the right quantity to the back of the eye becomes a challenge. Many attempts have been made to overcome this hurdle due to the rather devastating outcome of failure of therapy, loss of vision.

In our lab we work on ocular implants, implants that are prepared and loaded with the required medication to target the posterior segment of the eye. These implants are very small and rod shaped. They are designed in a way that facilitates their insertion to the back of the eye. Once inserted they sink to the bottom of the eye so that they don’t interfere with vision.  From there on they release a controlled amount of the drug over a designated time period to treat the malfunction or infection that has afflicted the back of the eye. The material used to produce the implant is known as a polymer and is biodegradable. This means once inserted in the eye the implant slowly starts dissolving or in other words degrades and therefore over a calculated time frame it completely vanishes without a trace.

As horrendous as it may sound the procedure is actually very simple and is carried out in the physician’s office rather than in a surgical setting. Moreover it doesn’t require sutures for wound closure. A novel single use applicator is used to insert the implant coupled with local anaesthesia ensuring the patient doesn’t encounter any pain. Thus instead of asking patients to repeatedly apply eye drops or gels over months a single application of the implant can take charge of the driving wheel and do the job while the patient can sit back, relax and enjoy the a clearer vision

My primary focus is to design on a very intricate level the structure of the polymers used to regulate the performance of the implant in the eye. As well as modulate how the loaded drug is released throughout the allocated time frame. What I mean by that, the rate at which the drug leaves the implants and infuses the inflicted part of the eye. Working on a molecular level is very interesting since you get to see how minor changes in the design have significant impact on performance. Designing thus becomes an art and the more you add to your masterpiece the more spectacular the view becomes. Well in the end it is all about a clearer vision isn’t it?