What causes these diseases? How can they be treated or prevented?

Now, an innovative research team in London, Ont. is looking at those old questions in a brand new way.

The team brings together three very different disciplines -- medical research, biology and engineering -- in an approach to the research that the members believe is a first in Canada.

"We're all interested in the same questions but what we each bring to the table is a much different perspective and I think that's what takes this into the innovative realm," says Dr. Cindy Hutnik, an ophthalmologist, medical researcher and associate professor at the University of Western Ontario, who has hooked up with biologist Kathleen Hill and engineering professor Tim Newson.

Bringing in the engineering aspect is particularly exciting, Hutnik says, explaining the rationale: "Maybe glaucoma, for example, isn't a nerve disease. Maybe it's a support-structure disease. That's where some of the engineering questions might come in because engineers deal with support and stress and strain."

In fact, says Newson, who started his career as a civil engineer but got drawn into research a decade ago as the result of chat with an ophthalmologist during a rugby game in his native Scotland, the eye behaves as a structure.

"It's a pressure vessel, a pressurized sphere." The cornea, he says, is like the dome of a building. And the mathematical principles used in engineering apply equally to the structure of the eye.

In her lab, Hutnik studies the cells of the eye but notes that at the base of all cells are the genes, the DNA, which is Hill's particular area of interest.

"So as a team, we're able to look at the whole eyeball, right from the little molecules that make it up, into the building blocks, the cells, that compose it, right up to the entire structure ... How do these building blocks come together and is it, maybe, how they're not coming together that's the problem. I think that's what makes this innovative."

The research is already well underway and "the information is starting to roll off the press," says Hutnik, who will be presenting some of the first results at national and international meetings this spring.

One of the areas the team has focused on is drug delivery, using such cutting-edge equipment as a synthetic eye model and a mini-CT scanner, one of only four in the world.

"We're looking at where is the best place to put the drug, how does it flow from point A to point B. With the CT scanner you can study the flow of the drug once you've injected it. It's the idea of, you tell me where the disease is and I'll tell you how to get the drug there."

This is an exciting project, she says, because it can apply to all eye diseases.

In another experiment, mice have been genetically programmed to develop diseases similar to AMD and glaucoma. Drugs are then being tested to see if the degeneration can be prevented.

Hutnik hopes to establish this Experimental Eye Research Facility as a centre of excellence that will eventually pull in researchers from still other disciplines to add their expertise. The facility is also a training centre for students interested in vision research.