1. Polycaprolactone nanofibrous materials as an efficient dry eye test strip
- Author
-
Isaac Macwan, Khyati K. Patel, Miad Faezipour, Prabir Patra, and Ashish Aphale
- Subjects
chemistry.chemical_classification ,education.field_of_study ,Materials science ,Capillary action ,Population ,Polymer ,Biodegradable polymer ,Electrospinning ,chemistry.chemical_compound ,chemistry ,Nanofiber ,Polycaprolactone ,Wetting ,Composite material ,education - Abstract
Dry eye symptoms are moderately common in the general population and are often chronic particularly amongst the older adults above age 65. Dry eye can occur from conditions such as aging, dehydration, corneal ulcers and associated infections, vitamin A deficiency or as a temporary or permanent side effect of laser treatment. Some of the tests available to identify a tear deficient eye are Schirmer strip test, strip Meniscometry and phenol red thread test, the most popular being the Schirmer's test, where a patient is tested positive for a dry eye if the test strip is wet for less than 5mm of length over a period of 5 minutes and negative for wetting of at least 10mm within 5minutes. Here we report a simple design and fabrication of an efficient dry eye test strip using a laboratory developed metal rotating collector for electrospinning setup that aligns nanofibers of Polycaprolactone (PCL), a biosafe and biodegradable polymer. Electrospun PCL nanofibers have diameters in the range of 70 โ 150nm depending upon the protocol creating either aligned or randomly oriented nanofibers. It was found that both random and aligned PCL nanofibers test strips show fast wetting time of 5 seconds for covering the same distance of 10mm that a conventional test strip covers in 5 minutes making our product approximately sixty times faster and exhibiting high throughput. We believe that this is because of higher capillary transport and better wetting of the nanofibers. It is further demonstrated that the concentration of PCL plays a crucial role in the formation of the nanofibers and hence the wetting phenomena.
- Published
- 2014
- Full Text
- View/download PDF