By combing through old scientific journals, medical-device companies are finding effective, but brutal treatments for common diseases, Alexis Madrigal reports — brutal treatments that could be transformed by modern technology into safer, noninvasive procedures:
Pairing a century’s worth of surgical history of glaucoma treatment with recent advances in materials design, a California company called The Foundry developed a highly engineered device that can drain fluid out of the eye just like a nasty early-20th-century procedure that involved cutting a hole in the eye.
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The Foundry’s glaucoma device is based on a treatment popularized in 1906. German surgeons discovered a simple solution for glaucoma — where the eyes’ lubricating liquid gets blocked, creating pressure that kills off the optic nerves: They simply sliced open a hole in the eye to let fluid drain out.It worked, according to the medical reports of the day. The pain was tolerable — it only required cocaine and adrenal shots, not general anesthesia — but it left patients with a hole in the eye that could be made too big, dangerously reducing eye pressure, or that spontaneously closed up, eliminating its positive effects.
So the technique was abandoned, despite a 1930s review that found the procedure, called cyclodialysis (.pdf), worked 80 percent of the time when used on the right types of glaucoma.
Now, rather than physically cutting a pathway for the fluid, a newly-designed implant could act as a tiny pipe that drains fluid out from the front of the eye. This might solve the problems long-associated with the procedure — and a spin-off company has $7 million in venture capital to give it a go.