A/prof Tina Wong Tzee Ling

Biography

Associate Prof Tina Wong is a Senior Consultant in the Glaucoma Service at the Singapore National Eye Centre (SNEC) as well as head of the Ocular Drug Delivery Group at the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI). She holds an adjunct faculty appointment at the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). She is also co-Director of the Ocular Therapeutic Engineering Centre (OTEC) at NTU. Prior to taking up her position in Singapore, she was a Glaucoma Fellow and Research Fellow at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, UK, where she had completed her general Ophthalmic training. She was awarded the Wellcome Trust Vision Research Fellowship in 1999 for which completed a PhD on the role of matrix metalloproteinases in conjunctival wound healing following glaucoma surgery in Professor Sir Peng Khaw’s laboratory at the Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London. Her research led to the award of the Oxford Ophthalmological Congress Fould’s Trophy as well as the prestigious Moorfields Research Gold Medal in 2006. Her research focuses on the discovery of new methods to improve ocular wound healing following surgery. The second arm of her research involves the development of sustained ocular drug delivery systems and the delivery of targeted cell based therapies. This is achieved through a combination of the knowledge garnered from the basic understanding of wound healing biology, application of appropriate animal models of ocular disease and the innovative application of materials science technology and nanoengineering to develop advanced, cutting-edge solutions to improve on current diagnostic tools, medical and surgical treatments in glaucoma and other ophthalmic diseases that require long-term and or intensive topical medications to manage the disease. These include anterior segment ocular inflammation, allergy and infection, and proliferative retinal diseases. Associate Prof Wong’s laboratory has recently developed and published a new mouse model of ocular scarring which will greatly facilitate the study and discovery of potential new antifibrotic therapeutic targets. Together with her team at NTU, a first-ever sustained drug release nanomedicine for glaucoma has been developed and a Phase 1 trial successfully completed in SERI, under the Translational Clinical Research (TCR) 5 year grant of S$25Million that was awarded by the Singapore National Medical Research Council to SERI in 2008. A/Prof Wong has authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications, 4 book chapters and a book – a patient handbook on glaucoma. She currently holds 8 patents to her name. She is involved in both local and international education programmes, courses and regularly presents at international meetings. She is a member of the Associate Advisory Board of the World Glaucoma Association. Assoc Professor Wong was awarded the National Clinician Scientist Award in 2010 for her work on novel drug delivery for glaucoma, and the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award at the APAO in Sydney in 2011 for her extensive contributions to ophthalmology and research in glaucoma.

Research Interest

medical sciences