Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they have used artificial intelligence models and machine-learning algorithms to successfully predict which components of amino acids that make up therapeutic proteins are most likely to safely deliver therapeutic drugs to animal eye cells.

The project, a collaboration with researchers from the University of Maryland, holds promise for advancing new and more tolerable drug treatments for common chronic blinding eye diseases, including glaucoma and macular degeneration, which affect 3 million and about 20 million people in the United States, respectively. Current drug therapies for these diseases, consisting of multiple daily eyedrops or frequent eye injections, are effective, but such delivery systems may be difficult to sustain and tolerate over time, and have encouraged scientific efforts to develop delivery systems that would bind to components of eye cells and safely extend the therapeutic impact of the medications they carry.