Alphabet's life sciences arm Verily has paused one of its first research projects — contact lenses that aim to measure a diabetic patient's glucose levels.
Brian Otis, PhD, chief technical officer of Verily, outlined the company's reasoning for putting the project on hold in a Nov. 16 blog post. Verily launched the "smart lens" project with Novartis' eye-care division Alcon in 2014. At the time, Verily was known as Google Life Sciences. The project's goal was to equip contact lenses with small sensors that measure glucose levels to help diabetics manage their condition.
Eventually, Verily hoped a monitoring system using contact lenses would decrease the need for diabetes patients to perform regular finger pricks to test their blood sugar — a process researchers called "disruptive" and "painful" when they first announced the smart lens project.
However, after conducting clinical studies on the smart lenses, Verily determined contact lenses weren't able to obtain accurate readings based on the small quantities of blood sugar levels in a wearer's tears. Dr. Otis noted 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."
The pause doesn't mark the end of Verily's smart lens work, however. Verily and Alcon will continue to develop specialized contact lenses for presbyopia, or age-related farsightedness, and for improving a wearer's sight following cataract surgery. These ophthalmology projects build on Verily and Alcon's success creating contact lenses that sense and transmit data from a wearer's eye, according to Dr. Otis.
"We're looking forward to the next phase of development on our other two smart lens programs with Alcon, where we are applying our significant technical learnings and achievements to prevalent conditions in ophthalmology," he wrote.