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Alcon, Verily shelve glucose-monitoring lens project
Alcon and Verily have suspended work on a glucose-sensing smart contact lens for patients with diabetes, according to a post on Verily’s website.
The companies partnered in 2014 to manufacture the lens in order to help those living with diabetes better manage the disease. The partnership has grown to include a smart accommodating contact lens for presbyopia and a smart IOL to improve sight after cataract surgery. The original glucose-measuring product, however, has not been as successful.
“Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment,” Brian Otis, PhD, Verily chief technical officer, wrote on the company’s blog.
The companies will now focus on the other two smart lens programs.