SINGAPORE - Whenever Professor Lee Tian Tee travelled, he needed to check with the airline or hotel whether he had access to a fridge because he needed one to store eye drops for his glaucoma, a condition where eye pressure increases due to a build-up of fluid inside the eye. The eye condition can cause damage to the optic nerve and lead to blindness. The Singaporean music professor, 61, was diagnosed with glaucoma in 2016 and had to live with the inconvenience of using medicated eye drops several times a day to reduce the pressure in his eyes. In 2018, his eye doctor, Prof Paul Chew, a senior consultant at the National University Hospital's (NUH) department of ophthalmology, invited him to be part of a clinical trial for a new implant being developed at the time. The Paul Glaucoma Implant (PGI) was developed by Prof Chew, who is also from the National University of Singapore's Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and a team of clinician-scientists from the National University Health System. Clinical trials in Singapore were successfully carried out between December 2017 and December 2018 and the implants are now used by leading hospitals and established eye centres in 17 countries, in...