In Vitro Assay of Cornea Artificial Properties

Blindness is still the crucial eye disorder. Many possibility of blindness cause, one of them is cornea ulcer. Cornea ulcer is characterized by the presence of suppurative infiltrate and partial loss of cornea surface due to tissue death. The tissue necrosis is caused by bacteria, fungi, and herpes simplex virus. In this decade, transplantation even from donor is the only treatment which could widely accepted for blindness. Hence, the cornea synthetic could be the alternative solution. However, treatment donor transplants have many shortcomings in post surgical complications such as immuno rejection, incompatibility and the length of time healing. As technology develops, there are many corneal substitutes based on natural sources derived from collagen or their derivatives because they promise better properties in biocompatibility. The aim of research are to conduct the synthesis and characterization of collagen-chitosan-glycerol-HPMC as artificial cornea such as water content, spectrophotometry and degradation value. Based on the spectrophotometric test, collagen-chitosan-glycerol sample has a higher absorbance value which is 3.29% while collagen-chitosan-glycerol-HPMC sample value is showed 1.57%. In the water content test, collagen-chitosan-glycerol sample has a higher water content when compared to collagen-chitosan-glycerol-HPMC. The water content results are showed the difference in the water content value of sample with collagen-chitosan-glycerol and sample with collagen-chitosan-glycerol-HPMC. The degradation percentage of collagen-chitosan-glycerol sample is 0.9469% while the value of collagen-chitosan-glycerol-HPMC sample is 0.6861%. Degradation study is showed that under simulated physiologic conditions for 3 days, the percentage of degradation were low and it was in accordance with the artificial corneal necessity.Biocomposite of collagen-chitosan-glycerol could be considered as artificial cornea due to the proximity with the corneal characteristics.Experimental