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An Alternative to Lasik — Without the Lasers (www.acs.org)

submitted 2 months ago by cm0002@piefed.world to c/science@mander.xyz

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[–] kayzeekayzee@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

In the body, the shapes of many collagen-containing tissues, including corneas, are held in place by attractions of oppositely charged components. These tissues contain a lot of water, so applying an electric potential to them lowers the tissue’s pH, making it more acidic. By altering the pH, the rigid attractions within the tissue are loosened and make the shape malleable. When the original pH is restored, the tissue is locked into the new shape.

In this work, the team constructed specialized, platinum “contact lenses” that provided a template for the corrected shape of the cornea, then placed each over a rabbit eyeball in a saline solution meant to mimic natural tears. The platinum lens acted as an electrode to generate a precise pH change when the researchers applied a small electric potential to the lens. After about a minute, the cornea’s curvature conformed to the shape of the lens — about the same amount of time LASIK takes, but with fewer steps, less expensive equipment and no incisions.

Sounds cool! Hope it continues to do well in further testing, since it hasn't been performed on any live animals yet.

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 3 points 2 months ago

It sounds insanely cool! They already managed it on a live rabbit eyeball apparently, now for an actual live rabbit. But honestly, I'm not really sure what could go wrong if a live eyeball works. It's a pretty mechanical change, not much else in the body (if anything) is affected.

I guess the big thing would be refining the method for accuracy and then scaling up so that many people can get the treatment at ab affordable price point. Though I suppose if the platinum lens is basically the "correct" eyeball shape, it just needs to be sized correctly w.r.t. the size of your eyeball. That sounds like you could make a whole bunch of templates for different eye sizes, and then reuse them for everyone with that size?