What if a contact lens could both assess the daily needs of an eye disease and provide care? This futuristic prototype exists for glaucoma. Designed by a team from Korea’s Postech University in Pohang, it has been tested on rabbits and is the subject of an article in the journal Nature Communications.
“For this project, we started from our previous research, a smart lens that monitors glucose in tears and delivers drugs to treat diabetes (Science Advances)”, explains Professor Sei Kwang Hahn, lead author of both publications. The new prototype took four years to materialize, he says, “because we have used multidisciplinary knowledge and technologies: nanomaterials, electronics, wireless communications, biotechnologies, use of medical and pharmaceutical products”he lists.
Glaucoma, an irreversible eye disease, affects approximately 1.5 million people in France and results from an increase in intraocular pressure (IOP). She can remain silent for almost two decades and leads to progressive atrophy of the optic nerve. It is the second leading cause of blindness in developed countries after age-related macular degeneration. The main remedy is the administration of eye drops whose function is to reduce the IOP, “but many patients do not respect the method and time of the indicated treatments”, explain the authors. Hence the idea of this “theranostic” lens (portmanteau word combining the adjectives “therapeutic” and “diagnostic”) which continuously measures the pressure using sensors and delivers eye drops if necessary (the drug used here is Timoptol), included in the device.
Higher intraocular pressure at night
“All glaucoma treatments, whether medical, laser or surgical, have one goal, to lower IOP. The difficulty is that it can vary from hour to hour and is, for example, higher at night.comments Professor Antoine Labbé, ophthalmologist specializing in glaucoma at the Paris hospital of Quinze-Vingts.
“By combining continuous monitoring of intraocular pressure and direct drug release, this futuristic lens is attractive, acknowledges the practitioner. However, you have to be careful. A system that works on test platforms will not necessarily do so on the human eye under real-world conditions. »
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