Singaporean researchers have created a lens made of micro-needles to plant in the eye of a patient with eye disease.
This could revolutionize the lives of millions of people around the world. Singaporean researchers have developed a lens capable of treating eye diseases such as glaucoma and macular degeneration, a study published in the journal reveals. NatureCommunications beginning of November. Conclusive tests have been carried out on mice.
Micro-needles
Today, these diseases, which are increasingly common due to the aging of the population and the prolonged use of contact lenses, are treated with eye drops. But this method is impractical and lacks precision. This is why researchers at Nanyang Technological University came up with the idea of developing a lens dotted with tiny dissolvable needles that act as syringes to be inserted into the patient’s eye. These micro-needles consist of an outer layer which delivers a first dose of drops and an inner layer which administers the second for several days.
“By simply pressing the lens on the eye, the small detachable needles can penetrate the tissue of the ocular surface and serve as micro-reservoirs of implanted drugs. The biphasic drug release kinetics made possible by the micro-reservoirs at double layer greatly improves therapeutic efficacy,” said Chen Peng, a professor at the School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at Nanyang Technological University.
A total hope of recovery
“Using corneal neovascularization as a disease model in mice, administration of anti-angiogenic monoclonal antibody through the eye patch can reduce neovascular area by 90%, which is much better than drug efficacy with eye drops, which is about 15%“, he develops. The hope of recovery is therefore total.
However, in order to bring their miracle product to market, the scientists first try to optimize the composition and stiffness of the micro-needles to make the lens more comfortable for the patient. Let’s hope that the latter will be marketed before 2050, the date on which 115 million people in the world should be blind, against 36 million currently, according to the worrying forecasts of experts…
Sudden trauma to the eye
Glaucoma is an eye disease caused by damage to the optic nerve that causes an irreparable decrease in the field of vision. If we do not know most of the time why the disease appears, it sometimes occurs following a brutal trauma to the eye, a cataract, a pronounced myopia or even diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disorders or hypothyroidism uncontrolled. If left untreated, the affected person is at risk of going blind.
Macular degeneration, on the other hand, results from the deterioration of the macula, a small area of the retina located at the back of the eye, near the optic nerve. It causes a progressive and sometimes significant loss of central vision which then becomes increasingly blurred. It mainly affects people aged 55 and over. This is called age-related macular degeneration or AMD. There are two kinds of AMD: dry and wet. The first, the least serious form, is the most frequent. It evolves over several years. The second is characterized by the formation of new blood vessels under the retina and leads to much faster loss of vision: sometimes in just days or weeks.
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