B.C. optometrist sees way for a bionic-lens implant
Imagine being able to see three times better than 20/20 vision without wearing glasses or contacts — even at age 100 or more — with the help of bionic lenses implanted in your eyes.
Dr. Garth Webb, a B.C. optometrist who invented the Ocumetic Bionic Lens, says patients would have perfect vision and that progressive and contact lenses would become a dim memory as the eyecare industry is transformed.
Webb says people who have the specialized lenses surgically inserted would never get cataracts because their natural lenses, which decay over time, would have been replaced.
Perfect eyesight would result “no matter how crummy your eyes are,” Webb says, adding the bionic lens would be an option for someone who depends on corrective lenses and is over about age 25, when the eye structures are fully developed.
“This is vision enhancement that the world has never seen before,” he says, showing a bionic lens, which looks like a tiny button.
“If you can just barely see the clock at 10 feet, when you get the bionic lens you can see the clock at 30 feet away,” says Webb.
He says the painless procedure, identical to cataract surgery, would take about eight minutes and a patient’s sight would be immediately corrected.
Webb, the CEO of Ocumetics Technology Corp., has spent the last eight years and about $3 million researching and developing the bionic lens, getting international patents and securing a biomedical manufacturing facility in Delta.
His mission is fuelled by the “obsession” he’s had to free himself and others from corrective lenses since he was in Grade 2, when he was saddled with glasses.
“My heroes were cowboys, and cowboys just did not wear glasses,” Webb says. “At age 45 I had to struggle with reading glasses, which I found was a great insult. To this day I curse my progressive glasses.”