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A research team in Seoul found a path that bypasses most of that. It\u2019s delivered through the eye. <\/p>\n
Until now, contact lenses have never been used to treat a brain disorder.<\/p>\n
Eyes as gateways<\/p>\n
The retina at the back of each eye begins as brain tissue during development. The visual signals it sends travel along neural pathways that pass through mood-regulating regions.<\/p>\n
Jang-Ung Park, a materials scientist at Yonsei University<\/a> in Seoul, wanted to use that direct and biological link as a way inside.<\/p>\n Existing depression treatments such as pills, electroconvulsive therapy, and surgical brain implants all aim at the same circuits. They just require difficult paths.<\/p>\n Park\u2019s team asked whether a soft contact lens sitting on the cornea could send a useful signal through the eye instead of the skull or scalp.<\/p>\n Two beams overlap<\/p>\n The trick is a method called temporal interference. Two electrodes are built into the lens, and each emits a high-frequency electrical signal that the retina<\/a> ignores on its own. <\/p>\n But where the two signals cross, they produce a slower combined rhythm the cells will respond to. This results in a kind of remote stimulation.<\/p>\n The surface of the eye stays calm, while the activity only flares deeper, where the two beams meet. That meeting point can be steered to land near mood-regulating regions of the brain.<\/p>\n Earlier human trials<\/a> of the approach pressed electrodes against the scalp, never the eye. Going in through the eye sidesteps the skull entirely.<\/p>\n Building the lens<\/p>\n To keep the lens both soft and clear enough to see through, the team built ultrathin electrodes from gallium oxide topped with platinum.<\/p>\n The full assembly stays transparent, so light still reaches the back of the eye. The lens<\/a> body uses the same flexible material as standard soft contacts.<\/p>\n That combination is conductive, nearly invisible, and gentle on the eye\u2019s surface. This engineering piece makes the rest of the idea work.<\/p>\n Detailing the experiment<\/p>\n The team set up four groups of mice. One stayed healthy and untreated, serving as the baseline. <\/p>\n A second was put under chronic stress to induce a depression<\/a>-like state, then left alone. A third received the lens treatment in 30-minute sessions, once a day, for three weeks. <\/p>\n The fourth got fluoxetine, the active ingredient in Prozac and one of the most prescribed antidepressants in the world.<\/p>\n Researchers then ran the mice through standard behavioral tests, recorded electrical activity in their brains, and measured chemicals in their blood and tissue before and after.<\/p>\n Brain wiring restored<\/p>\n Depression degrades the conversation between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, two regions that handle memory, emotion, and decision-making, according to research<\/a>.<\/p>\n The recordings showed this disconnect clearly in the untreated depressed mice. But in the lens-treated group, the disconnect reversed. <\/p>\n Activity in the two regions tracked together again, much closer to what the healthy controls showed. <\/p>\n The fluoxetine group improved too. But the lens treatment didn\u2019t trail the drug. It matched it.<\/p>\n Body chemistry changes<\/p>\n Biology moved with it. Stressed, untreated mice carried high corticosterone, the rodent equivalent of cortisol. Within three weeks of treatment, those levels dropped by nearly half.<\/p>\n Serotonin, the neurotransmitter most antidepressants try to lift, climbed by close to the same amount. Inflammatory molecules in the brain, another known marker of depression, fell as well.<\/p>\n The changes didn\u2019t always line up perfectly between the two treatments. But the overall direction did, with both pulling the same biological markers back toward a healthy baseline.<\/p>\n Machine learning verdict<\/p>\n To check whether the improvements were as broad as they appeared, the team fed every measurement, including behavior, brain<\/a> recordings, and blood markers, into a machine learning model.<\/p>\n There were no labels indicating which mice had received which treatment. When asked to sort the animals by similarity alone, it placed the lens-treated mice in the same cluster as the healthy controls. <\/p>\n It separated them from the untreated depressed group entirely. Until this study, no one had shown that a contact lens could treat an animal\u2019s full depression profile.<\/p>\n A device most people associate with blurry vision had just performed work that previously required drugs or implants.<\/p>\n What happens next<\/p>\n What is known now is that a soft lens worn for 30 minutes a day can deliver enough signal through the retina to reach the brain\u2019s mood circuits.<\/p>\n In mice, it changes behavior, brain activity, and body chemistry in tandem, performing about as effectively as one of the world\u2019s most widely used antidepressants<\/a>.<\/p>\n What happens next depends on whether the same effect appears in humans. If it does, depression treatment could gain an option that does not require a daily pill, a clinic visit, or a surgical implant.<\/p>\n The team is now working on a wireless version of the lens and plans safety testing in larger animals before clinical trials. <\/p>\n For patients who cannot tolerate antidepressants or who have not responded to them, this may eventually become another treatment option.<\/p>\n The study is published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Patients need depression treatments to reach the brain, but the brain is well-guarded. Pills travel the bloodstream for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":693329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":["post-693328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/693329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}