Jul 21, 2009 03:30 PM
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Tue Feb 9
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Are you one of those people that gets squeamish when you have to put eye-drops in? Good news! A new type of contact lens can deliver eye medication with no fuss all day, every day for 30 days.
Researchers at the Laboratory for Biomaterials and Drug Delivery at Children's Hospital Boston saw the need for a new way of getting eye medications delivered. They found that, using traditional eye drops, less than ten percent of the medication stays in the eye; blinking and tears wash out the rest.
The solution that this team developed is a multi-layer contact lens, with a biodegradable medium containing the drug inside of it. The contact lenses can slowly release the drug into the eye.
I'm already getting a weird feeling, talking about biodegradable polymers in my eye. But all of the materials used in these contacts are FDA-approved already, and the lab is already testing on animals, moving on to human testing as soon as possible. It's probably better than multiple-times-a-day eye drops, but you still have to get this thing into your eye...
A drug-dispensing contact lens [via Science Blog]
Send an email to Stephen Goldmeier, the author of this post, at stephen@io9.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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