Introduction: Ocular implants offer long-term treatment of diseases such as glaucoma, retinopathy, and macular degeneration. We have developed extrusion processes to manufacture PLGA implants with a variety of different APIs. The small size of the implants, typically < 500 µm in diameter by 4-6 mm in length, presents challenges for inspection and characterization to ensure the quality of the implants. The very small nature of the parts makes them susceptible to static and makes weighing of individual units slow and difficult. Other approaches for efficiently inspecting implants are needed.
Learning Objectives:
understand methods for efficiently inspecting and ensuring quality of ocular drug delivery implants.
translate inspection methods to other types of drug delivery implants of simple geometry.
