Cataracts can be dissolved by an eye drop that scientists have made

Researchers in the US have made a new drug that can shrink and dissolve cataracts, which are the most common cause of blindness in people. The drug can be put directly into the eye with an eye dropper.

Even though the effects haven’t been tested on people yet, the team from the University of California, San Diego hopes to replicate the results in clinical trials and offer cataract patients an alternative to the only treatment they have right now, which is often painful and very expensive surgery.

Cataracts affect tens of millions of people around the world. They cause the lens of the eye to get cloudier and cloudier, and if they aren’t treated, they can cause total blindness. This happens when the structure of the crystallin proteins that make up the lens in our eyes breaks down, causing the damaged or disorganized proteins to stick together and form a milky blue or brown layer. Cataracts don’t spread from one eye to the other, but they can happen in both eyes on their own.

Scientists don’t know exactly what causes cataracts, but most of them are related to age. The US National Eye Institute says that by the age of 80, more than half of all Americans either have a cataract or have had surgery to remove one. The surgery to remove a cataract is very simple and safe, but it is also very painful. Many communities in developing countries and rural areas do not have the money or facilities to do the surgery, so the vast majority of patients will go blind.

The Fred Hollows Foundation says that there are about 32.4 million blind people in the world today, and that 90% of them live in developing countries. More than half of these cases were caused by cataracts, so having an eye drop instead of surgery would make a huge difference.

The new drug is based on a steroid called lanosterol that is found in nature. Researchers came up with the idea to test how well lanosterol works on cataracts when they heard about two children in China who were born with a type of cataract that didn’t affect their parents. The scientists found that these siblings all had a mutation that stopped their bodies from making lanosterol, which their parents did not have.

So, if the parents made lanosterol and didn’t get cataracts, but their children didn’t and did, the researchers thought that the steroid might stop the defective crystallin proteins from sticking together and forming cataracts in the non-congenital form of the disease.

They did three kinds of tests on their eye drops with lanosterol. In the lab, they worked with human lenses and saw that the size of cataracts got smaller. Then, they tested the effects on rabbits. According to Hanae Armitage of Science Mag, 12 of the 13 rabbits went from having severe cataracts to having mild cataracts or none at all after six days. Last, they tried the eye drops on dogs that had cataracts on their own. Like the human lens in the lab and the rabbits, the drug worked well on the dogs, causing severe cataracts to disappear or almost disappear.

Jonathan King, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Armitage, “This is a really thorough and convincing paper. It’s the best one of its kind I’ve seen in a decade.” Even though King is not part of this study, he has been researching cataracts for 15 years. “They found the phenomenon and then did all the experiments that you should do. That’s as biologically relevant as you can get.”

The next step is for the researchers to figure out how the lanosterol-based eye drops cause the cataract proteins to react in this way, and then to move on to testing on people.