Cataract surgery to restore vision as we age is the world鈥檚 most common procedure, but a new analysis of research conducted at the John A. Moran Eye Center supports further testing to determine if cataracts might someday be reversed with eye drops.
Moran Eye Center CEO and Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences Randall J Olson, MD, is the corresponding author of , published in the American Journal of Ophthalmology.
Age-related cataracts occur as abnormal proteins accumulate and cause a gradual clouding of the eye鈥檚 lens. Nearly one in five Americans aged 65 to 74 has cataracts that impair vision; 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 multicenter Phase 1/2 clinical trial that tested C-KAD, an eye drop solution developed by Livionex, Inc. 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 in the lens that are an aspect of the accumulation of abnormal proteins in the lens.
Participants in the clinical trial, conducted at the Moran Eye Center 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 to 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 shows contrast sensitivity did improve for a significant portion of patients, paving the way for the drops to move into phase three clinical trials.
鈥淐urrently, there are no FDA-approved pharmacological therapies for age-related cataracts; surgery is the only option,鈥 says Olson, an internationally recognized cataract expert recently named among the Top 100 most influential people in the field of ophthalmology. 鈥淭his 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.鈥