Can't stand your glasses anymore? If you live across the Atlantic, next fall you'll probably be able to choose (or not) whether to relegate them to the bottom of a drawer andopt for eye drops (provided you probably pay more than $50 a month). There Food and Drug Administration has in any case given the green light to a new treatment to correct presbyopia in adults. Named Vizz and developed by the firm Lenz Therapeutics, he joins other similar products that have been available for several years now.
What is it? In any case, substances with so-called cholinergic properties already used in the treatment of glaucoma. For these eye drops positioned as an alternative to glasses, the principle is as follows: act at the level of the so-called ciliary muscles, i.e. those of'a structure of the eye called the ciliary body located behind the iris, whose role is to modulate the convergent power of the lens and to allow accommodation in the field of vision.
Mild and transient side effects
The drop of eye drops produces a so-called stenopic effect, which increases the depth of field without causing blurred vision. Here, with Vizz, it is aceclidine that contracts the iris muscle; this reduces the diameter of the pupil by approximately 2 mm. With the two other products already marketed in the United States, one since 2021 (Vuity – AbbVie) then Qlosi, (Allergan) in 2023, it was pilocarpine.
The various so-called Clarity clinical trials (called 1, 2 and 3) conducted with Vizz have been published in recent months in various scientific journals and their results regularly presented by Lenzz at international congresses. According to these data, more than five hundred patients have been included to date and more than 30,000 cumulative treatment days have been analyzed. Concretely, the improvement in near vision is felt after approximately 30 minutes, with an effect lasting up to 10 hours with a single instillation.
With a concentration of 1.44 % of aceclidine in its latest version, the action of Vizz would be carried out in a more selective and more refined manner than its predecessors, which allows it to claim fewer side effects. Because, According to the results communicated by the laboratory, if tolerance seems satisfactory to date and no serious adverse effects have been mentioned, they do indeed exist, even if they are benign and transient. The most common are eye irritation (20 %), blurred vision (16 %) and headaches (13 %). As for the long-term effects of daily instillation, they are still unknown, as there is insufficient experience to date.
A “paradigm shift in the management of presbyopia”
For its part, the laboratory specifies that the first samples will be available in the United States in October and that marketing is planned by the end of the year. For Dr. Marc Bloomenstein, the researcher who led the trials at Lenz, the recent FDA approval is obviously a “paradigm shift in the management of presbyopia”, this visual disorder occurring with age and potentially affecting almost everyone in the long term.
It remains to be seen how users will react to this eye drop, which is expected to retail at around €80 per month for pilocarpine-based products, and what long-term pharmacovigilance data will emerge. While its ease of use may attract millions of presbyopes who want to do without glasses, widespread use—driven by the arrival of other treatments in development—risks leading to reports of adverse effects.
CAs before any medication, the most moderate voices will therefore advocate occasional rather than regular use in order to play the caution card. Primum non nocere. As a reminder, glasses have no side effects, and can only be lost or broken.
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