Optometrist Eleisha Dudson shares her experience with Abiliti at CCLS NZ 2024

Unveiled to the Australasian market last year, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Vision’s Abiliti 1-Day myopia-control soft contact lens is currently being trialled with 10 practices across New Zealand. The pre-market evaluation release is to gain insight to connect the company’s therapeutic and clinical learnings with real-world, in-practice experience,” said Alisha Walker, J&J’s Auckland-based senior customer development manager. “Because the optics are very unique, we wanted to understand how it works for real-world patients’ lives. Obviously, dealing with children there are all sorts of different considerations to dealing with adults, so this is about how we ensure that when we do roll this out, every practitioner is armed with the right knowledge about the science of the lens and what the patient is going to experience.”

Eleisha Dudson, a Wellington-based optometrist who specialises in myopia management and contact lens fitting, including ortho-k, scleral lenses and custom lenses, is one of the practitioners who’s been trialling the lens. Presenting a series of case studies at CCLS NZ, focusing on some of her trickier, younger patients, Dudson said Abiliti’s unique technology was designed not just to control myopia, but also for comfort, ease of handling and visual quality. “The Misight lens now has eight years of data behind it, so there’s been a lot of time to generate a new lens design.”

Anne Matheson with J&J Vision’s Wendy Hung, Alisha Walker
and Hirdesh Nair

Designed to fit children, Abiliti employs J&J’s patented Ringboost technology, which is a specialised optical design where light, which passes through the outer treatment zone, is focused in front of the retina but off the line of sight in a ring around the axis. This innovation was designed to break the interdependence between efficacy for slowing the progression of myopia and vision quality. According to the company, “Typical multifocal or dual-focus lenses utilised for myopia management provide treatment power of no more than +3D along the line of sight, whereas Abiliti 1-Day lenses provide treatment power with a +7D ring focus and a +10D central boost.” In studies, this was shown to reduce axial elongation by 0.105mm, on average, in as little as six months.

“Of all the patients I have tried with this lens, the comfort is either better or the same as other lenses they’ve worn,” said Dudson, adding that one even said it felt like they had nothing on their eye. “What we’re doing is putting these low Dk (a measure of oxygen permeability) lenses on children at an earlier age for long wear, so we really need to have this high oxygen, comfortable lens on the eyes, so it’s safe into the future as well.”

New Zealand is the fourth country to introduce Abilti 1-Day, after Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong. The lenses are currently going through TGA approval in Australia.

"This really is breakthrough technology when it comes to myopia management as it addresses some of the barriers to getting into myopia control for children,” said Walker. “The material is very easy to handle and the feedback we’re getting confirms this, that insertion and removal are very easy so the children feel very confident with them… and because the lenses are more comfortable, they are wearing them for longer, so their compliance is higher, which is obviously going to have a positive impact on their myopia management.”