This eye medication is alive.
Anyone with a corneal injury or chronic ocular surface disease knows how annoying medicated eye drops can be. It’s easy to forget that it’s time to squeeze a few drops out of the bottle.
One estimate shows that up to 40% of older patients forget.
University of Pittsburgh researchers, however, are exploring an alternative that requires fewer applications and actually works better: bacteria.
They took a harmless bacterium that lives on mouse eyes. With a little genetic engineering, the scientists were able to get the bacteria to release an anti-inflammatory substance that can repair corneal wounds just like medicated drops.
The bacterium is also superior because it remains on the eye’s surface for 12 weeks or longer. Eye drops, meanwhile, tend to wash away quickly with our tears as we blink.
In tests with mice, the modified bacterium worked better than medicated eye drops in healing the cornea, and the treatment was safe. The little one-cell organisms also had no effect on the eye’s normal immune defenses.
In separate experiments, a different strain of the same engineered bacterium worked similarly well on human corneal cells.
Any medication ready for your local pharmacy is probably still years distant, if further testing and eventual clinical trials are successful. But scientists are encouraged.
Don’t get creeped out by the prospect of having bacteria applied to the cornea. Humans and all living things peacefully coexist with bacteria. Bacteria help us digest food, for example. Good bacteria can also crowd out the bad bugs that can make us sick.
Meanwhile, keep an eye out for this medication in the future.