By Prarthana Mitra
Researchers from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed glow-in-the-dark contact lenses that can help users painlessly fight and even prevent the occurrence of diabetes-related blindness.
These lenses are a lot less scary, painful and invasive than existing effective treatments and can provide patients with a more viable solution than laser eye surgeries and injections.
Here’s what happened
Diabetes is a widespread metabolic disorder that attacks and debilitates blood vessels throughout the body, including those in the eyes. It cuts off the blood and oxygen flow to the nerve cells in the retina and can lead to their eventual death, thus leading to visual impairment. This condition can be stymied, even prevented altogether, by reducing the retina’s oxygen demand.
As opposed to frying the tertiary peripheral cells by laser surgery or by injecting blood vessels directly into the retinas, the latest technology targets the rod cells which are known to enable vision in low light conditions for which they require more oxygen.
“Your rod cells, as it turns out, consume about twice as much oxygen in the dark as they do in the light,” said Caltech graduate student Colin Cook, adding, “If we turn metabolism in the retina down, we should be able to prevent some of the damage that occurs.”
For the same reason, the contact lenses have been designed in a manner that reduces the retina’s night-time oxygen demand, by giving the rod cells the faintest amount of light to look at while sleeping. It achieves this by the embedding minuscule vials of tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen gas with a phosphorescent coating, arranged in a radial pattern much like in wristwatches. In the dark, the pupil expands, and the faint glow from the vials can illuminate the retina, reports Science Daily.
Early testing of the lenses revealed diminished rod cell activity, by over 90%, when worn in the dark.
Why you should care
Hundreds of millions of people suffer from diabetes worldwide, putting them at risk of creeping blindness, or diabetic retinopathy, which appears commonly as a side-effect of the disease in its more advanced stages.
The prospects of development of new and healthy retinal vessels are quite low due to the disorder. Even if new vessels emerge, they cause bleeding inside the eye’s clear fluid, obscure vision and compound existing vision problems. Often scar tissue develops in place of retinal vessels and light-sensing cells, thus leading to partial or total blindness.
Cook hopes his contact lenses will offer a solution that patients will be more enthusiastic to try because of the minimal effort involved as well as the lack of side effects. His glow-in-the-dark lenses are being hailed as “an innovative solution with a potentially huge impact on diabetic retinopathy,” according to Yu-Chong Tai, Caltech’s executive officer for medical engineering. Cook was reported as saying that the next few months will focus on testing the lens’ ability to reduce retinal metabolism in a way that could prevent diabetic retinopathy altogether.
Already drawing attention from venture capitalists, the potentially groundbreaking innovation now awaits FDA approval for clinical trials. If all goes well, in a few years, these lenses will perhaps help diabetic patients see the world in a different light.