Work On Google’s Glucose Monitoring Contact Lens Halted

Google’s Life Sciences division unveiled a project it was working on to measure blood glucose levels back in 2014. It developed a smart contact lens which was supposed to provide a non-invasive way of obtaining the blood’s sugar levels. The division later came Verily, a company under Google’s parent Alphabet, Inc. It has now announced that work on the smart contact lens for blood glucose monitoring has been halted.

They had initially teamed up with Alcon, the eye care subsidiary of pharma giant Novartis, to develop the contact lens into a commercial product. The team says that while this evolved into a versatile electronics platform that supports actions like sensing and transmitting data on the eye, there just isn’t enough consistency in the readings.

Many clinical study sessions were conducted with individual users and hundreds of thousands of biological data points were collected from on-eye readings. The tests revealed that 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.”

One major challenge was to obtain reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment. The team found that interference from biomolecules in tears preventing them from obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film.

It has thus been decided along with Alcon to put work on the project on hold. They will continue working on the smart accommodating contact lens and smart intraocular lens projects but the aim will no longer be to use it as a non invasive method of obtaining blood glucose readings.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Medical
Tags: Google