Gel restores sight to people with untreatable condition, scientists say

A commonly used gel has restored sight to people suffering from a rare and untreatable condition that causes blindness, scientists have said.

HPMC - hydroxypropyl methylcellulose - a low-cost gel used in most eye surgeries - restored vision for seven out of eight patients with hypotony, researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London found. Hypotony, which affects about 100 people in the UK each year, is abnormally low pressure in the eyeball, which usually results in a change to its shape.

After 12 months of fortnightly HPMC injections in people with the condition, researchers found the shape of the eye was restored. The clear and colourless gel is usually used in surgery to maintain the eye's shape during operations, or to coat its surface for protection and to prevent it from drying out.

Harry Petrushkin, consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields, said patients having an eye operation "will have had this gel in or on their eye at some point, but normally that gel is washed off or washed out at the end of surgery". He said the "really safe" substance is "not dissimilar to cosmetic fillers".

"It fills the space, but in this context, it fills the space with something that's transparent and see-through, and allows you to give a certain amount per patient to fill the eye up to the size it's supposed to be," he added. "A bit like if you're pumping up a ball, you can pump it up to exactly the right size, and then the eye can see much better." Hypotony can be caused by "a number of different diseases" as well as trauma, inflammation or complications after surgery and all management plans "have had quite a lot of problems".

It is currently treated by filling the affected eye with silicone oil, which can be toxic to the eye and is "not great" in the long-term. "The advantage of using a gel rather than silicone oil is that you can actually see through it much better," Mr Petrushkin said.

The research, published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, included eight patients with hypotony whose eyes were injected with HPMC every couple of weeks. The jabs not only restored their eyes' shape, but also returned sight to seven patients after 12 months of treatment, with "no serious side effects to date.