Unveiled to the Australasian market last year, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Vision’s Abiliti 1-Day myopia-control soft contact lens is currently being trialled with 10 practices across New Zealand. The pre-market evaluation release is to gain insight to connect the company’s therapeutic and clinical learnings with real-world, in-practice experience,” said Alisha Walker, J&J’s Auckland-based senior customer development manager. “Because the optics are very unique, we wanted to understand how it works for real-world patients’ lives. Obviously, dealing with children there are all sorts of different considerations to dealing with adults, so this is about how we ensure that when we do roll this out, every practitioner is armed with the right knowledge about the science of the lens and what the patient is going to experience.”
Eleisha Dudson, a Wellington-based optometrist who specialises in myopia management and contact lens fitting, including ortho-k, scleral lenses and custom lenses, is one of the practitioners who’s been trialling the lens. Presenting a series of case studies at CCLS NZ, focusing on some of her trickier, younger patients, Dudson said Abiliti’s unique technology was designed not just to control myopia, but also for comfort, ease of handling and visual quality. “The Misight lens now has eight years of data behind it, so there’s been a lot of time to generate a new lens design.”
