A new eye drop drug has been
developed which will shrink the cataract or in some case will dissolve it as we
all know that cataract eye surgery cost lots of money and cataract is one of
the leading cause of eye blindness affecting the lens of millions of people
around the globe.
Till now this eye drop
medicine has not been tested in humans but this is the second stage of the
study and if it becomes successful.
A molecular biologist,
Jonathan King from Massachusetts institute of technology in cambridge said that
this is a really comprehensive and compelling paper - the strongest of its kind
in a decade. He has been working on cataract proteins since 2000.
Cataract
Crystallins is the major
component which is kind of fiber cells which forms the eye lenses and this is
very unique property of this protein which also makes it prone to susceptible
damages.
So when you are born in this
world, all the fiber cells lose their ability to discard old proteins and make
new proteins so when you are adult then at that time also you have the same
crystallins in your eyes which were present at the time you were born with.
There is one more substance called chaperones which keeps crystallins
soluble and these crystallins must maintain their flexibility and transparency
for proper functioning of eye lenses. So when chaperones and crystallin
combines together they make a configuration called amyloids and these amyloids
make it harder for light to pass the lens creating the cloudiness called
cataract.
The scientists have not been able to find the exact cause of cataract
till now but majorly the cataract problem is related to the age as it is found
more in the people who have crossed age limit of 50 which makes it a global
problem.
According to a study which was done in 39 countries it was found that
globally the number of people who are visually impaired is estimated to be 285
million and out of these numbers 33% of the cases are of blindness due to
cataract.
The cataract problem is also majorly found in the developing countries
and the developing countries like is also taking it as a major challenge
because the ultimate cure for this problem is eye surgery which is very
expensive and all people cannot afford the price.
The new eye drops developed to cure the cataract are based on a
naturally occurring steroid called lanosterol and many researched have been
done to explore the possibility of using this steroid to cure the cataract
problem.
The scientists used lanosterol based eye drops in three types of
experiments.
In the first experiment the scientist worked on human lenses in the
laboratory.
Secondly they performed the experiment on rabbits and finally they
tested eye drops on dogs with naturally occurring cataracts.
