'Wearing Your Meds,' New Contact Lenses that Medicate Themselves Continuously

As a veteran contact lens wearer (and even longer lubricant eye-drop user), I’m very excited by the news that scientists have come up with a lens that delivers medication directly to the eye over extended periods, according to a story at news.yahoo.com that originally ran at tecca.com by Randy Nelson.

Mark Byrne, an associate professor at Auburn University's Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, may be my angel someday soon. He thinks he has the answer for all frustrated contact lens wearers who need medication in their eyes. In the past, contact lens wearers would simply have their lenses dipped in medication. But that way the medication either ran out of the eye or dried up after 15 to 20 minutes, according to the story. The new lenses allow a dose of medication to be delivered simply through contact with the eye, Andrew McCaslin writes at The Auburn Plainsman.

The eye drops Byrne proposes are “engineered on the molecular level to deliver medicine at a steady rate over periods ranging anywhere from 24 hours to 30 days without needing to be removed, even while sleeping,” the news.yahoo.com story reports.

Molecular biology deals with the basic structure or organization of DNA so that it can be sequenced or mutated, according to biology-online.org.

Byrne and his team of researchers continue to work on this way to deliver antihistamines, antibiotics, and other helpful medications to your eye, but unfortunately, I won’t be able to give up my old eye drops just yet.  The new lenses need to be approved first by the FDA.

The benefits are clear. Randolph Jonsson at gizmag.com writes that “it makes sense that chronic dosing would yield more benefits than sporadic, not to mention the added convenience of potentially being able to forget about medicating for days at a time.”

The lenses are disposable and can be left in for up to 30 days, according to Jonsson.