Moran Doctors Win Awards at AAO

Salt Lake City, Utah
December 28, 2007

Moran's own Nick Mamalis, M.D., Director of the Ophthalmic Pathology Laboratory, won a Best in Show award at this year's American Academy of Ophthalmology, for his video "Prevention of Posterior Capsule Opacification: New Treatment Modalities." Co-producers of this award winning video were Wellington Chang, Jonathan Johnson, Kandon Kamae and Liliana Werner. In this film, Dr. Mamalis and colleagues evaluate new treatment modalities for the prevention of posterior capsular opacification. Mechanical removal of lens epithelial cells (LECs) using both irrigation/aspiration and a loop device is evaluated in research eyes. In addition, a high-temperature water jet and an Er:YAG laser are evaluated in research and animal eyes. The latter two treatments are shown to be more effective in removing LECs when research and animal eyes were evaluated using both gross and light microscopy. Mechanical loop removal systems were moderately successful.

Moran Research Associate Professor, Liliana Werner, M.D., Ph.D. also won a Best Paper of Session award for her paper entitled - "Postoperative Optic Opacification of Silicone IOLs: Analyses of 20 explants." Co-authors were Nick Mamalis and Randall Olson. This is the first year the AAO meeting had the Best Paper of Session award, and Dr. Werner is the first to ever receive it in the Cataract Session. Her presentation was about a 2-year long study investigating the cases of early and late postoperative opacification of silicone intraocular lenses, which were explanted in Brazil, France, UK, Hong Kong, and the US. Techniques of investigation included gross and light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy.

Dr. Werner also won another AAO Best in Show video award, with a video produced at the Berlin Eye Research Institute (Manfred Tetz, Matthias Mueller, Liliana Werner. Making Verisyse and Veriflex implantation easy!). The video describes new instruments and techniques, which were developed at that institute, to facilitate implantation of iris-fixated phakic intraocular lenses. The same video also got major awards this year at the ASCRS meeting in San Diego, and at the ESCRS meeting in Stockholm."

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