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Peter Madden

Research Fellow

Email:PEMADDEN@tcd.ie

Biography

Peter received a Joint Honours BSc at Newcastle University, before beginning his career with the eye at Bristol University, training as a Cryobiologist which led to a doctorate in corneal preservation. This was then furthered with postgraduate work at the MRC Cryobiology group at Cambridge University. After moving to Australia to continue the research, he was asked to establish a State Eye Bank for Queensland. This gave him exposure to the clinical requirements of ophthalmic surgery and quality assurance under Good Manufacturing Practice. The Bank was the first to be licensed by the Therapeutic Goods Administration and expanded to supply corneal tissue not only to Queensland, but also spare corneas were supplied throughout Australia and to other countries. Dr Madden was honoured to receive the national civil award of an Order of Australia for this endeavour.
Moving to Liverpool in 2015, he took the role of Coordinator for a Research Eye Bank, with responsibilities for all aspects of a coordinated system for approaches to next of kin for consent for donation for research use only, eye retrieval and distribution to researchers.
In 2017 he joins the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering to further his research of corneal endothelial transplant methods and support the strengths of the group with corneal substitutes.

Project: Generation of biomaterials for corneal endothelium regeneration and transplantation

His work has been directed at improving methods of corneal collection, handling and storage for transplantation. More recently, it has been focused on the design of biological constructs of the cornea to reduce the requirement for conventional cadaveric donation of eye tissue. As part of this, at the Queensland Eye Institute, he established the routine culture of human corneal endothelial cells and investigated their survival in tissue engineered constructs, in particular silk fibroin film, which has been proven to endure surgical manipulation with potential to replace many conventional corneal transplants.