Contact lenses that deliver medication

It is a disease that strikes most of us once too often - either forgetting to take the meds, or forgetting the ones that have been already downed, and thereby ending up with an overdose. Well, here's the good news. Patients with eye problems such as dry-eyes and glaucoma can now look forward to some help from technology that promises to take over when you have discovered the imperfections of your own memory. And it is a contact lens that delivers medication gradually over time, and eliminates the need to use messy eye drops.

Heard right. Boston researchers report that they’ve created a contact lens that can deliver a high concentration of antibiotic at a constant rate for more than 30 days. Call this a great boon for eye patients considering the statistics that even if you do diligently put in your eye drops, for every administration, only 1 to 7 percent of the medication actually gets absorbed into the eye, while the rest drips down the cheeks or into the back of the throat. The new contact lens design can apparently provide large amounts of drug released at constant rates for long periods of time, which previous discoveries have not been able to do.

The research is currently being tested in a lab dish and is expected to soon move towards animal testing. Human lenses of this kind? Perhaps well before we set up life on the moon.

Via Medlaunches.