Over the year there’s been a strong team of individuals working under the Ocular Surface Laboratory (OSL) banner.

We’ve had some fantastic research support on the latest stage of our exploratory work on manuka honey as a treatment for blepharitis (www.eyeonoptics.co.nz/articles/archive/honey-for-blepharitis/) from part-time research fellow Dr Andrea Cruzat, who joined us from Schepens Eye Institute in Boston. A difficult career choice required Andrea to relocate to Chile recently, sadly, but we plan to continue our collaborations and hope to work together again in future. Helping to soften the blow of Andrea’s departure, we’ve been delighted to welcome clinician scientist and full-time research fellow, Dr Alex Muntz, who joins us from the University of Waterloo where he completed his PhD under the supervision of Professor Lyndon Jones. His article in this special feature describes the research he’s been involved in, evaluating the eyelid margin at a cellular level.

The lab supports a large number of research students who work diligently to complete degrees at doctoral, masters and honours level, or join us for shorter-term projects for medical programme selectives, research electives or as summer students. It’s exciting to see senior PhD students, Sanjay Marasini and Ally Xue, close to completion of their PhD studies, and we were delighted to see Dr Priyanka Agarwal, who was supervised by Dr Ilva Rupenthal and myself, successfully defend her PhD thesis recently and receive the honour of placement on the Dean’s list of Excellence.

We also welcome Dr Michael Wang as the newest PhD candidate in the group. His project will focus largely on epidemiological studies of dry eye, but his extensive experience in the tear film and ocular surface, from his collaboration with the lab over many years, will no doubt see his involvement across many other areas during this time. Doctoral co-supervision opportunities extend as far as Melbourne where second-year PhD student, Ceecee Zhang (University of Auckland optometry graduate) is exploring the neurotrophic potential of omega-3 in a study in diabetes, under the primary supervision of senior lecturer, Dr Laura Downie. BOptom honours students Lexia Ah Kit, Brinda Mamidi, Alicia Han and Kylie Mann completed projects with us last year, some published examples of which are described below.

We were delighted to have optometrist and now junior doctor Dr William Shew, return to the OSL to conduct a repeatability evaluation of infrared meibography and to work with Dr Simon Dean, Dr Kosar Kheirabi and the team, on projects evaluating the impact of chalazion surgery on the meibomian glands, in collaboration with Dr Brian Sloan, Olga Brochner and Kathryn Lee at Auckland Hospital. Results of this work are currently in preparation for publication, after which we hope to share the outcomes in a future issue of NZ Optics.

Publishing more than 20 articles in peer-reviewed scientific optometry and ophthalmology literature last year alone, the OSL was a veritable hive of industry and all credit goes to those who worked hard to get these papers to this level.

During the year, our team focused on three main dry eye disease research areas including studies relating to its epidemiology and diagnostic test refinement as well as clinical trials that seek, through clinical and laboratory testing, to evaluate the outcomes of the increasing number of therapeutic and management strategies. The following articles (entitled OSL) provide an overview of some of the recently published projects from the OSL team in each of these three areas.

The Ocular Surface Laboratory (OSL) is a research facility located within the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Auckland. Led by A/Prof Jennifer Craig, a team of clinical researchers contribute to the better understanding of ocular surface disease to improve patient management of anterior segment disorders and, in particular, dry eye disease.