You could have vision 3 times better than 20/20 after an 8-minute surgery.
Who doesn’t want to be able to see better? Glasses get dirty or lost. Contacts need to be replaced and kept clean. Imagine how great it would be if everyone had perfect 20/20 vision. Now imagine everyone being able to see three times better than that! It sounds like a hoax, right? Well, soon it could become a reality.
Ocumetics Technology Corporation is in the process of developing a bionic lens that, after an eight-minute surgery, could make it possible for patients to see as clearly as if they naturally had three times better than 20/20 vision.
Dr. Garth Webb, an optometrist in British Columbia and the CEO at Ocumetrics Technology Corporation, explains that the lenses would be custom-made and surgically implanted into each eye and that since the bionic lenses wouldn’t decay over time, patients would never get cataracts.
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Webb, who told the CBC that “[t]his is vision enhancement that the world has never seen before,” hopes to make these lenses available in the next two years and says that they could be an option for anyone over the age of 25. Children and young adults would not make good candidates, as their eyes are not fully developed.
During the surgery, a custom-made lens would be folded in a saline-filled syringe in order to placed into a patient’s eye, where it would then unravel in under 10 seconds. The patient’s sight would be immediately corrected.
After eight years of hard work and about $3 million spent, Webb was finally able to present his lens to 14 of the top ophthalmologists at the annual gathering of the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery earlier this year.
Webb told the CBC that his motivation lies in his childhood dreams: "My heroes were cowboys, and cowboys just did not wear glasses."
"I think this device is going to bring us closer to the holy grail of excellent vision at all ranges — distant, intermediate and near," said Dr. Vincent DeLuise, an ophthalmologist who teaches at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.
“Perfect eyesight should be a human right,” insists Webb. Everything now depends on the success of clinical trials.
