The National Eye Institute has awarded researchers from the University of Purdue’s College of Engineering two grants totaling $6.7 million to continue their development of specialized smart contact lenses.
Let’s start with these researchers.
Heading up the research team is Chi Hwan Lee, the Leslie A. Geddes associate professor of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, followed by five other members from Purdue, Indiana University's School of Optometry, and University of Michigan’s Michigan Medicine.
And these grants?
The funding is through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Project Grant Program (R01), which provides financial support for health-related research and development based entirely on NIH’s mission.
Now this innovation.
Lee and the team developed a new ocular technology designed to continuously monitor intraocular pressure (IOP) in the eye as an early detector for glaucoma as well as for other chronic ocular diseases.
This innovation is based on Lee’s specialization in StickTronics—sticker-like items containing electronics or smart technology—which have been converted into “wearable biomedical devices that continuously monitor and manage chronic diseases or health conditions unobtrusively.”
Give me more on StickTronics.
The sticker-like items with high-performing electronic circuits appear as smart thin films that act as sensors and can be attached to “stick” to objects.
The result: enabling inanimate objects to operate as smart devices that “can sense and report real-time information about their environment and condition,” according to a 2020 article by the Purdue College of Engineering.
So what does this have to do with contact lenses?
Using this StickTronics technology, researchers have developed a unique class of smart soft contact lenses—based on popular commercial brands—that provide “continuous 24-hour IOP monitoring, even during sleep,” Lee stated.
How are these lenses designed?
The lenses, according to Lee, include the same “intrinsic lens features” of standard soft contact lenses, including:
- Lens power
- Biocompatibility
- Softness
- Transparency
- Wettability
- Oxygen transmissibility
- Overnight viability
Together, these features are key to “translating the smart softness contact lenses in to ocular disease care,” stated Lee.
Why: Because current IOP-measuring devices are lacking them.
How so?
Standard tonometers are designed with an integrated circuit chip that creates an increased lens thickness and stiffness—often causing varying levels of discomfort for patients (including, in some cases “an acceptable” level of discomfort).
Per Lee, this discomfort is avoided with the researchers’ smart contact lenses.
So how will this funding be used?
The researchers plan to use the new funding to further develop the soft lenses.
Additionally, clinical trials are in the planning stages—in collaboration with Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine, the Indian University School of Optometry, and Michigan Medicine—to “assess the lenses’ biosafety, usability, functionality, therapeutic effectiveness, and durability.”
And lastly …
Through the Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization, the researchers have also applied for a patent through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to protect this technology.