Yesterday, I was writing about corrective laser vision surgery in "How to Get an Eagle Vision." Today, I'll be nicer with your eyes.
Katrina Woznicki reports that eye diseases like glaucoma could one day be treated by pharmaceuticals delivered through contact lenses.
Patients might be able to one day receive prescription medications through tiny particles embedded in soft contact lenses, researchers said Sunday. They said they have developed a method to encapsulate a medication in nanoparticles, particles so tiny they are microscopic and cannot be felt or seen by the eye.
Chemical engineers, led by Anuj Chauhan of the University of Florida in Gainesville, Fla., said the particles could be used to administer medications to treat eye conditions, such as glaucoma, but also possibly other ailments elsewhere in the body because the eye may provide a more direct route for the drug.
Chauhan, who reported these findings at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society, said the drug-laden lenses would be worn for up to two weeks. They work by steadily delivering a consistent supply of the medications directly into the eye. Although people who are not vision-impaired could use these lenses, Chauhan said the lenses could also be created to improve vision while delivering medicine simultaneously.
So when will see these new contact lenses? Not anytime soon.
The lenses are in the very early engineering design stages and have not been tested clinically. "We're in the very preliminary stages of developing this technology right now," Chauhan says. No in vitro or animal testing has yet been done.
Chauhan cautions this is just a theory and the next phase is to make lenses and test them on animals before testing them on humans.
Dr. Rand Allingham, director of glaucoma service at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. and an associate professor of ophthalmology said if done right, such a product could have promise among the 35 million who wear contact lenses and the other millions of people who, while not needing vision correction, would prefer this delivery of medication.
Source: Katrina Woznicki, UPI Science News, March 23, 2003
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