A current practice for predicting ocular toxicity of systemically delivered drugs

Abstract

The ability to predict ocular side effects of systemically delivered drugs is an important issue for pharmaceutical companies. Although animal models involving standard clinical ophthalmic examinations and postmortem microscopic examinations of eyes are still used to identify ocular issues, these methods are being supplemented with additional in silico, in vitro, and in vivo techniques to identify potential safety issues and assess risk. The addition of these tests to a development plan for a potential new drug provides the opportunity to save time and money by detecting ocular issues earlier in the program. This review summarizes a current practice for minimizing the potential for systemically administered, new medicines to cause adverse effects in the eye.

Keywords::

• Eye
• toxicity
• drug development
• drug safety
• ocular toxicity

Acknowledgments

The authors appreciate and thank Damir Simic, Colleen Doshna, and Dan Baltrukonis for help in the conduct of experiments and data collection.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest.