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| Image Source: usatoday.com |
Google is teaming up with pharmaceutical giant Novartis to develop a "smart" contact lens intended to replace reading glasses for people who can't read without them and glucose monitors for those with diabetes.
For people with vision problems, the device would work like the autofocus of a camera, allowing them to focus on close-up things like the words in a book. It will be designed to work as a contact lens that is changed out regularly, or as an intra-ocular lens, permanently inserted into the eye during cataract surgery.
For diabetics, the lenses would replace regular finger sticks designed to read out a person's blood glucose level. Instead, the lens will "read" glucose levels in tears, sending information wirelessly to a handheld device that will warn patients when they need to eat or lower their glucose levels.
"These are issues that have been unmet medical needs for quite some time," said Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez.
Novartis' eye-care division Alcon, based in Texas, inked the deal today to do the development work, along with Google X, an innovation lab at the information company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, which had previously announced plans to make "smart" contacts.
Jimenez, said he hopes the contact will be the first of many technologies the two companies develop together.
"It was very clear that there could be a very nice synergistic value between bringing high tech together with biology to solve some of the biggest health care issues that we're facing," Jimenez said.
The work is still preliminary, he said, with testing in people expected to begin next year. It will be a few years before the lens can be considered for regulatory approval and reach customers.
He said a price had not been decided for the lenses, and would not disclose how much the two companies will be investing in the project other than to say that it will be "commensurate with the business opportunity."
More than 1.7 billion people worldwide have presbyopia, the medical term for eyes that lose their ability to focus up-close with age, and more than 380 million have diabetes, he said.
Diabetes experts said they see two potential problems with glucose-monitoring lenses.
First, it's not clear whether glucose in tears, which the device would measure, changes in sync with the glucose in blood.
"There are no available data to show any reliability of this sensor," said Robert Ratner, chief scientific and medical Officer of the American Diabetes Association. "Is this going to be a situation where you have to change the contact once a day, once a week or once an hour? All of these are unknowns."
Second, diabetics are most at risk for crashing blood sugar levels at night while they're sleeping. But that's also when most people take out their contacts.
"Any type of contact device is going to need to be something that can be worn overnight if it's going to be able to realize the benefits people need, which is to get warning alarms when their glucoses are going out of range overnight," said Howard Wolpert, director of the Joslin Institute for Technology Translation at the Harvard-affiliated Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.
For aging eyes, there are also many other alternatives to the contacts, from glasses to low-tech contacts to LASIK surgery, said Kerry Assil, an ophthalmic surgeon in Los Angeles.
But still, he said, if the "smart" contacts can be made to work, it would be a boon to patients. "Any new thing that can provide people with a slightly enhanced visual clarity, reduced side effects and so forth, tremendously elevates their sense of well being and their sense of confidence."
Dr. Hitesh K. Patel is an Edison-based opthalmologist and founder of the Patel Eye Associates. Follow this Twitter account to learn more about the latest trends in eye care.
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