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A contact lens that slowly releases drugs in to the eye to treat glaucoma continues to be developed by researchers at MIT, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard School of medicine. The lenses provide a sort of ‘hands free’ option to medicated eye drops or more expensive treatments such as laser surgery for the treatment of glaucoma.
Glaucomas are eye disorders arising from build-up of pressure on the optic nerve which provides a bridge between the eye and the brain. Glaucomas affect more than 60 million people worldwide. Unless treated, they can result in permanent blindness. There is certainly no cure, but early diagnosis and treatment can control or prevent blindness in patients.
Taking eye drops containing drugs to reduce fluid build-up is easily the most common and efficient treatment solution, however it has some drawbacks. Merely a fraction from the drug actually gets absorbed; the rest enters the nasal passage or spills over, causing irritation to the skin. Sometimes patients simply forget to consider their eye drops regularly. Overall, less than 50 percent of patients who use eye drops stick to it, the researchers wrote within their paper, which appeared in the journal Biomaterials.
For fifty years now, contacts that release drugs periodically into the eyes happen to be explored as a substitute treatment option. However, those developed to date can only release the drug for some hours after first use.
The newly developed contact lens, however, can deliver vast amounts of the drug constantly for at least a month C a long any lens continues to be able to perform so far, they wrote. The lens eliminates the necessity to keep an eye on and take eye drops daily, and requires to be changed just once per month.
The lens consists of a thin film of FDA-approved polymer and latanoprost C the drug used in eye drops C entrapped alongside of a regular contact lens, enabling controlled release.
For a minimum of a month, the lenses were able to release the drug at amounts much like that taken by the patient daily by means of eye-drops. They also tested for any toxic or allergy symptoms as a result of breakdown of the lens material or even the drug and located none. Neither the lenses nor the drug harmed cells grown within the lab or animals, they wrote.
The lenses can be created to custom specifications widely used for correcting short or long sight. They can also be tailor-made to produce antibiotics or drugs employed for other eye infections, the researchers believe.
“A non-invasive approach to sustained ocular drug delivery could help patients adhere to the therapy essential to maintain vision in diseases like glaucoma, saving millions from?preventable blindness,” Joseph Ciolino, Massachusetts eye specialist and first author, said inside a statement.
