Drug-Dispensing Contact Lenses: Coming Soon to an Eye Near You?
A contact lens that could deliver antibiotics and other medications directly to the eye is proceeding through early laboratory testing and could one day dramatically improve treatments for people with glaucoma, dry eyes, and other eye disorders, researchers said.
The hassle of having to use eye drops to medicate the eyes is just one reason many people would be happy to use medicated contact lenses. Eye drops also are not as effective as other methods of delivering medications such as antibiotics, since blinking of the eyes, natural tearing, and other factors mean only a small amount of the drugs actually are absorbed by the eye and allowed to go to work.
According to researchers led by the Laboratory for Biomaterials and Drug Delivery at Children’s Hospital Boston, tests show that a drug-dispensing contact lens now being developed is capable of containing and releasing large amounts of antibiotics and other drugs needed to treat a wide variety of eye disorders such as glaucoma, dry eye, infections, allergic conjunctivitis, and eye pain.
The research team developing the drug-dispensing lens also includes scientists from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to a Reuters Health news report.
Creating a contact lens that is capable of holding and dispensing medications at proper doses has eluded medical researchers for years. Previous attempts to develop such a product have resulted in lenses that either release very small amounts of a drug for long periods of time or very high levels of a drug for a short time, researchers said.
The new lenses now being developed have been proven effective at dispensing typical doses of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin into the eye for between 30 and 100 days, which greatly increases their effectiveness, according to the researchers.
The drug-dispensing lenses are about the same size and thickness and standard contact lenses and have already been tested in animals. Researchers hope they get the go-ahead to being human testing soon. There was no timetable announced for when they might be available for patients.
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