Ocular Drug Delivery Using Microneedles

To my dearest parents For their love, trust and supports ACKNOWLEGMENT I would like to thank my advisor, my thesis committee members, my research colleagues, my family and my friends who made this thesis possible. I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Mark Prausnitz for his support during my thesis work. Without his guidance, it would be difficult for me to complete my study. I would like to thank Henry Edelhauser for his expertise in ocular drug delivery. I would like to thank Mark Allen for letting me using laser room in MEMS facility. I would also like to thank the rest of my thesis committee members: Athanassios Sambanis, Dayle Geroski and John Nickerson, for their willingness to server on my committee and their guidance on my road to complete my study. In addition, I would like to thank Bernard McCarey and Glenn Holly at Emory University for help with the in vivo animal study. I would like to thank all my research colleagues for their supports and helps during my staying in the lab. Especially, I would like to thank Harvinder Gill and Wijaya Martanto for their thoughtful suggestions in experimental designs and analysis. I would like to thank Daniel Hallow for constantly putting up with my love taps; Deepta Ghate and Samir Patel for help me to conduct the animal study; Junghwan Park for teaching me the polymer microneedle fabrication procedure; Charlene Rincon for making the polymer films; Robyn Schlicher for her help and guidance regarding life in graduate school; Jyoti Gupta and Josh Hutcheson for always offering me free food. I would like to thank my undergraduate research assistant, Jason Moore, for helping me finishing the hollow microneedle study. I would also like to thank Tracey Couse for her help with histology. In addition, I would give special thanks to Donna Bondy and Trudy Walker for always iv looking after me. I will definitely miss the cookies Donna makes and the candies Trudy gives me. I would like to thank Kerry Taft at Georgia Eye Bank for providing me the human sclera tissue; Dr. Uday Kompella and Swita Raghava for supplying nanoparticles for my experiment; Dr. Aurelie Edwards for her helps in diffusion modeling. My thanks also go to all my fellow lab members: I would like to thank my parents for their constant encouragement and supports over the past fiver years. Without them, I would …