Say goodbye to eye drops

New Contacts Will Deliver Drugs to the Eyes Around the Clock Bpw via Wikimedia

In a breakthrough that is sure to thrill optical ailment sufferers and stoners everywhere, a team of Auburn University researchers has invented a new kind of drug-delivering contact lens that could make the medicinal eye drop a thing of the past. Their lenses are the first to deliver drug doses evenly for as long as the lens is worn, a method that is roughly 100 times more effective than putting sporadic eye drops in the eye.

By comparison, eye drops generally wash away within half an hour, requiring the user to repeatedly reapply them throughout the day. That leads to missed doses, poor efficacy, and a huge pain in the eye. The lenses--which can be corrective or not--release a constant drug concentration for anywhere from 24 hours to 30 days, depending on the lens, essentially delivering medicine steadily for as long as the lens is worn.

That’s a big improvement in terms of drug delivery. The contacts aren’t just lenses that have been soaked in medication, the researchers say, but controlled drug delivery devices that evenly distribute the release of pharmaceuticals to the eye via molecular imprinted drug memory into the lens structure without altering the other lens properties.

That means around-the-clock medication for things like eye inflammation and allergies, and, best of all, you can keep your corrective lenses in rather than riding out a rash of conjunctivitis wearing your specs. No word yet if they’ll load them up with Visine for you, Cheech.

8 Comments

Cool, so I can correct my eye sight AND hide my redeye from hanging out with friends. Sounds like a nice advancement :P

Jokes aside, this could really help with some of my friends that have issues with their eyes. One of my close friends has to continuously redose his eyes with special medication which involves taking the contant out, sitting with his eye tilted up for 3 minutes, soaking the contant in more fluid and putting them back into his eye roughly every 6 hours

Q

With some good quality hallucinogenic drugs in my contacts, I too can see dead people. ;)

Boy if only they manufactured contacts that made religious people able to see science in true light. Oh wait this is exactly that! :D FINALLY AN ARTICLE PERFECT FOR MY QUOTE!!!!

" Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Albert Einstein

yes!!! now all we have to wait for is internet streaming through the contact lenses that exports the data to the brain instantaneously. wanna know a language in a minute? just download the language data to your brain. no more hundreds of hours reading out dated text books.

_________________
The people of the world only divide into two kinds, One sort with brains who hold no religion, The other with religion and no brain.

- Abu-al-Ala al-Marri

Science sees no further than what it can sense.
Religion sees beyond the senses.

If these lens help people and do no harm, very cool!

Finally a safe way to dose, acid, liquid G, E and vodka w/o damaging the retina! J/K drugs are bad. Except MJ of course.

"Dude I just a new batch of contacts!"
"Okay I'll be right over with Grand Turismo 5 and a large pepperoni pizza!!"

Let's see if my insurance will even cover this. They already up and stopped covering Pataday (which has no generic equivalent).

Touche, Clay. Thanks for heralding this important discovery. Gibson gave me the thought of drugs via skin -- if nicoderm and morphine patches did not -- but drugs via contacts? Well done, science, I can only imagine where this will go. If only policy kept up with technology.



June 2013: American Energy Independence

Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.


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