LASIK eye surgery has been performed successfully in the U.S. since the late 90s, helping nearly 40 million patients to improve their vision through a procedure that cuts into the eye using lasers. Some 600,000 of the Food and Drug Administration-approved surgeries are carried out on American adults each year.
Now, researchers say they have come up with an alternative method that wouldn’t need invasive incisions and could be cheaper.
It uses a process called electromechanical reshaping, which helps to reshape the cornea using electrical current. The cornea is a dome-shaped, clear structure at the front of the eye that helps us to process images. Irregularly shaped corneas are the cause of nearsighted and farsighted vision and astigmatism, and LASIK fixes that by burning away tissue to reshape it.
“The whole effect was discovered by accident,” Brian Wong, a professor and surgeon at the University of California, Irvine, explained in a statement. “I was looking at living tissues as moldable materials and discovered this whole process of chemical modification.”
While the work is in its early stages, it could offer an alternative to LASIK. Although the surgery has been safely performed for nearly 30 years with rare complications, it has some limitations and risks. The surgeons say that cutting the cornea compromises the structural integrity of the eye.
This procedure has yet to be performed in humans, but researchers previously used electromechanical reshaping to alter scars and skin in pigs and reshape cartilage-rich rabbit ears.
Working with rabbit eyeballs, they constructed platinum “contact lenses” that served as a template for the corrected shape of the cornea, placing them over a rabbit eyeball in a saline solution meant to mimic natural tears. After about a minute following a small electric charge to the lens, the cornea’s curvature conformed to the shape of the lens. That happened in the same amount of time as LASIK, with fewer steps, no incisions, and less expensive equipment.
Then, they repeated the step on 12 other rabbit eyeballs. Of those dozen, 10 were treated as if they had nearsighted vision, and the researchers found success. In others, they saw that their technique might be able to reverse some chemical-caused cloudiness to the cornea, which is currently only treatable through a complete transplant of the cornea.
In the future, the researchers are planning tests on living rabbits, and looking at far-sightedness and astigmatism. Uncertainties in the team’s scientific funding have put those plans on hold, but Michael Hill, a professor of chemistry at Occidental College, will present their findings this week at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society.
“There’s a long road between what we’ve done and the clinic. But, if we get there, this technique is widely applicable, vastly cheaper and potentially even reversible,” said Hill.
