Professor Mark Wilcox

Researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney and Uka Tarsadia University in India have joined forces to investigate the potential of contact lenses as a drug delivery system to control, manage and treat various ocular diseases.

“Ocular diseases are usually treated using eye drops, but unfortunately these often don’t deliver enough drug or have the drug resident on the eye for long enough,” said Professor Mark Willcox from UNSW’s School of Optometry and Vision Science. “Using contact lenses to deliver the drugs can overcome these problems and may be used to treat diseases such as glaucoma, dry eyes, conjunctivitis, myopia development and macular degeneration.”

The Australian-Indian university partnership also facilitates collaboration between engineers, pharmacists, optometrists and chemists and has been formed at a critical time when research interest in managing diseases, such as dry eye and myopia development, is increasing, said UNSW.