BYU researchers find contact lenses may do more than replace glasses

PROVO — If eyes are the windows to the soul, then tears are messengers of the body, providing important information about how you feel.

Based on research coming out of BYU, contact lenses are the bucket that capture tears that lets doctors know how your body and soul are doing.

For the last decade or so, biochemists and other specialists have known that proteins carried by tears can provide medical information about anything behind the eye, including indicators of Alzheimer’s disease, macular degeneration, diabetic complications that affect the eye and some cancers.

The only issue was collecting the tears and then analyzing the proteins to see what health indicators researchers could see. Collection methods existed, but they caused a few problems, such as people not wanting to undertake the process — due to anything from annoyance to pain.

Well, a group of BYU researchers found a creative solution: contact lenses.

“None of the existing methods were great ways to collect tears. When we began, we wanted to find a more accessible approach to collecting tears,” said Keen Christensen, a biochemistry professor at BYU. He was one of the researchers. “Dr. Roden (another researcher) and I both had worn contacts, and we thought … ‘I wonder if we can get proteins off the contact lens.'”

After two-and-a-half years of research, the answer is, “Yes.”

Collecting tears has been difficult because the tears shed as a response to something like a ball hitting you in the eye — called reflex tears — are different than tears shed when you are an actress crying on cue. As Christensen said, there are hundreds and thousands of proteins in tears, and tears do not all have the same structures.

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Tears are more than just ways to keep the eyes clean.

–John Price

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Tears that run down your cheek, because you are sad, are different from the ones that rise when you are angry or any other emotion. The problem with these tears in terms of the research is that they and the reflected tears do not hold the indicators that could provide health information to anyone. Basal tears are what researchers were looking for, to see if contact lenses would serve as proper collectors and if the proteins could be seen.

“Tears are more than just ways to keep the eyes clean … but back when I learned that tears are different, I thought, ‘Wow,'” said John Price, a BYU biochemistry professor who was also a part of the research team. “But they carry molecules inside the body, and they have to tell us if there are any problems, what’s behind the eye.”

The research team, which included BYU undergraduate students, held a few studies to determine how contact lenses could and would work as collectors. They presently use super-soft hydrogel contact lenses to get the tears, a process that takes five minutes and did not bother many of the research subjects.

The general public will have to wait before asking an optometrist for a super-soft hydrogel contact lens to collect basal tears to check their health. The machine needed to read the proteins in the tears is very expensive and inaccessible to the average doctor. The process is also not ready to be in doctor’s offices. The team is conducting another study with clients at Rocky Mountain University in Provo, where Roden works to further understand tear collection.

Being in the doctor’s office is a goal, though. In the future, the tear capture and collection process could become as common as standing on a scale at the doctor’s office. The research team just needs to learn a few more things, first.

“The goal is always to make a positive contribution, that it helps people,” Price said.