A new American study appears to support the need for further testing to determine if cataracts might someday be reversed with eye drops.
Cataract surgery to restore vision as people age is among the world’s most common surgical procedures, with 3 million performed each year in the United States and about 250,000 annually in Australia.
But a new analysis of research conducted at the University of Utah’s John A. Moran Eye Center suggests eye drops might be able to be used instead.
Age-related cataracts occur as abnormal proteins accumulate and cloud the eye’s lens. Cataracts impair vision in nearly one in five Americans aged 65 to 74; the cure is to remove the cloudy lens and replace it with a clear artificial one.
The newly published analysis details the results of a multi-centre Phase 1/2 clinical trial that tested C-KAD, an eye drop solution developed by Livionex. The drops aim to reverse early-stage cataracts at the time when most people start noticing a decline in contrast sensitivity or the ability to see low-contrast images, such as street signs at night or words on a page in dim light.
Taken over time, the drops remove heavy metals that are an aspect of the accumulation of abnormal proteins in the lens.
“Currently, there are no FDA-approved pharmacological therapies for age-related cataracts; surgery is the only option,” said Moran Eye Center CEO Professor Randall J Olson, the corresponding author of the analysis, published in the American Journal of Ophthalmology.
“This eye drop therapy has the potential to help millions of patients challenged by cataracts worldwide, however the study was short term, not all patients showed improvement, and only early cataracts were tested. There is still much to learn about the length of effect and at what stage of cataract formation we can expect any improvement.”
A distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Prof Olson is an internationally recognised cataracts expert, recently named among the Top 100 most influential people in the field of ophthalmology.
Participants in the clinical trial, conducted at Moran and five other sites in 2008, used the drops or a placebo for four months. The short-term trial suggested that in some patients the lens does become clearer. However, the trial failed to show a statistically significant improvement in contrast sensitivity among participants when compared with placebo drops.
The new analysis corrects now well-documented limitations of the vision test used to measure contrast sensitivity in the clinical trial. The corrected data show contrast sensitivity did improve for a significant portion of patients, paving the way for the drops to move into Phase 3 clinical trials.
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