Future Treatments for Dry Eye Can Prioritize Anti-Inflammatory Route: Nicole Bajic, MD

Nicole Bajic, MD, ophthalmologist and assistant professor at Cleveland Clinic's Cole Eye Institute, spoke about how current dry eye treatments target the condition, which can inform the direction that researchers will take when developing new treatments for dry eye.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions are auto-generated.

Transcript

What are some treatments for dry eye that are in development?

Yes, there are currently a lot of clinical trials focusing on new therapies for dry eye. Essentially, they boil down to kind of more of the same of the targets that we currently have. Just to touch on some of those, 1 of the biggest causes of dry eye is inflammation, something increasing inflammation in the body. Reducing that inflammatory burden can help decrease the inflammatory signaling molecules that help cause dry eye. A lot of the therapies that we have on the market, like topical cyclosporine or lifitegrast, sometimes we use topical steroid drops too to reduce the inflammatory burden. We can also use some oral antibiotics, like tetracyclines, to help downregulate some of the inflammatory signaling molecules that contribute to this too, and that can help significantly.

One of the other things that we do is sometimes just physically blocking your ability to drain tears from your eyes. If we can't force you to make new tears, we'll make sure that you can at least keep the ones that you have around longer. We have 4 drains in our eyelids. One of the most helpful sometimes, I think maybe underutilized treatments, is punctal plugs And these you can either have temporary ones that dissolve with time, or permanent ones with silicone, where you just put little plugs in the drain of the eye, and it helps keep and retain more of your own natural tears. Now that does work best for people that have autoimmune conditions like Sjogren’s, where it causes decreased aqueous tear production. That's the watery component of tears. But it can be useful in a lot of other cases too. It'svery helpful to make sure you're seen and know what the best options are for your particular eyes.

Regarding the the stuff coming on the the market or the clinical trials, there are some drugs that we're considering using for different things. There is a new medication out for Demodex blepharitis, and it's thought that maybe it could be useful in other applications as well. But there are current trials looking into other anti-inflammatories and seeing how that can be beneficial too. We're very excited about all the potential options, and looking forward to seeing what comes down the pipeline.