 Our research group aimed to target the disease keratoconus. Keratoconus, the front of the eye, the cornea loses its shape. It loses the stroma of the cellular matrix which composes the cornea, and because of that it doesn't focus light onto the back of the eye properly. We wanted to turn the cells which form the cornea into a more developmental state so that they would reform a newer cornea in a better shape and be able to refocus that light back onto the eye and therefore the patient would see better. The eye drop contains a growth factor and a steroid at very, very low level so sub-toxic to the eye and sub-toxic to the cells that compose the eye so we think very safe. And what those eye drops do is that they act on the cells and they convince the cells that they are back at a much earlier stage in development. So in the embryonic tissue when you're in the embryo the eye forms from the neural crest so we convince the cells they're back at an earlier stage and because they're an earlier stage they express the molecules which are composed of the cornea in the embryo but then are replaced in human adult tissue. We are targeting initially adults so our therapeutic will be conducted on clinical trials eventually once we've done the sheet trials on adult, keratoconic patients and if that's successful we'll then target sub-patients who are not yet approaching surgical procedures and therefore we can hopefully resolve the keratoconus at a much younger age. We first again started looking at the tissue and how we could turn it back in developmental stages and we aimed first to turn it back into nerve cells so we gave it the cells a neurogenic factor and in fact they started looking and acting more like nerve cells could we then wanted to see if we could turn those cells into other cell types which also developed from the neural crest and one of those cell types is cartilage so that forms the tissue in your joints and we ended up expressing type 2 collagen which is specific into that cartilage tissue. Uniquely collagen 2 also is expressed in the cornea in the embryo and is replaced later by collagen 1 in the adult stage cornea so we were in fact turning back the developmental clock which enabled us to reform a much more and earlier stage cornea. The therapeutic works on human tissue in a dish we then process that into an animal model so it worked on live rodent models. We need to show that it works on a much larger animal model and that we can reshape the cornea and stabilize it for a long period of time so that we can help these patients with a much long term procedure. So the work we're doing now is moving into a sheep model so we will reshape the sheep cornea, add our therapeutic drop and then monitor how the shape of that cornea is maintained up to 6 months time so these are long term experiments. Once we've finished those experiments then we can start looking at doing human clinical trials so then we'll be looking at our end stage keratoconus patients and whether we can then trial the drops in our human patients in a safe and efficacious manner. The sheep results will continue throughout this year the analysis of the sheep experiment results will be concluded in early 2017 and then by the time we will then need to go for regulatory controls over our clinical trials so we could be looking at doing human clinical trials late 2017 if all progresses well. Our research is always aimed to help patients with eye problems In the early stages of this research we were looking at ways of restoring nerve tissue to corneal graft patients so when a patient has a corneal graft that tissue is excised and those nerves are cut that supply the eye and as you can imagine the eye is usually a very sensitive tissue and once you desensitize it then it's prone to accidents and trauma so we were actually looking at ways of restoring the nerve tissue we managed to in some ways restore that nerve tissue and then we started thinking about other developmental tissues which could also be restored in the eye and we happened to think about collagen types and if we could we then started to think about whether we could reshape the cornea firstly for keratoconus and now that we have established the initial experiments aimed at keratoconus we're now starting to look at designing our treatment for myopic patients and maybe treating short sightedness in the long run If everything progresses as smoothly as we would like it to if the cheap trials are successful and we move into clinical trials then proof in the clinical trials of very low toxicity and very high efficacy would then be proof of principle we believe for the food and drug administration towards approving the treatment for non-disease patients and that would open up the whole gamut of myopic patients short sighted patients worldwide which is over a billion people who suffer from short sightedness Ultimately what we would aim to develop the therapeutic for is treating children who are showing the first signs of developing myopia treating them at such a young age that it never even develops short sightedness that we stop it right at the start