Each month, Contact Lens Spectrum broadcasts a livestream series called “CLS Live!” during which host Jason Jedlicka, OD, sits down with leaders in the world of contact lenses to pinpoint key trends, critical insights, and intelligent takeaways. Dr. Jedlicka is a clinical professor at Indiana University School of Optometry and chief of the school’s Cornea and Contact Lens Service.

During each episode, Dr. Jedlicka and his monthly guest(s) discuss new and future products, the latest research, and worldwide trends in prescribing—and even bring viewers up to date live from the floor of CLS conferences such as the Global Specialty Lens Symposium.

>> Each CLS Live! episode airs on CLS’ Facebook and LinkedIn pages plus the CLS YouTube channel.

This episode, which originally aired on July 19, was the final installment in a past-present-future look at the industry. In this livestream, Dr. Jedlicka spoke with Joseph T. Barr, OD, MS, who is an emeritus professor at the Ohio State University College of Optometry. From July 2007 to June 2014, Dr. Barr was with Bausch + Lomb. He did return to Ohio State in 2014 to start a clinical research group and retired in 2017. Dr. Barr spent two decades as editor of Contact Lens Spectrum and was the founding editor of the Contact Lenses Today newsletter. He was recently inducted into the American Optometric Association (AOA) Hall of Fame. Dr. Barr is also co-founder, VP of development, and chief medical officer of Lentechs LLC.

Q: Jason Jedlicka, OD: Think about the 20-plus years that you were editor-in-chief [of CLS]…where were we with practice when you started? We’re talking about when soft contact lenses were vialed-yearly lenses, and rigid lenses were still polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA).

A: Joseph T. Barr, OD, MS: Oh, absolutely. And what an opportunity to learn what can go wrong with a cornea. We actually saw edema. We saw warped corneas from PMMA lenses—and yet, we knew there was potential there.

Q: Dr. Jedlicka: What did it look like when you left?

A: Dr. Barr: I remember the soft lenses were very thick, and you wore them until they hurt or caused too much giant papillary conjunctivitis. Then I think we went to quarterly replacement. Think about that compared to today, when you can get daily disposables. The manufacturing leverage is amazing, and the solutions improved so much. We have just come so far in terms of manufacturability and material science and solution technology.

Q: Dr. Jedlicka: What other big innovations pushed contact lenses forward into more utilization?

A: Dr. Barr: In the early days of this profession, only the really leading practices had staff who were trained or had learned from the practitioner how to fit and made their practice more effective. The integration of the rest of the team has really helped make contact lens practice more efficient. I’ve had the opportunity to be in a lot of practices of people who have a lot of contact lens experience, and the way they had developed teams in their offices was paramount.

Dr. Jedlicka: You talk about people who champion contact lenses and push them to the place they are now and who found success with contact lenses by doing it at a high level and doing it right. That probably pushed a lot more people to go into it because they saw that success was possible.

Q: Dr. Jedlicka: Let’s talk a little bit about Contact Lenses Today.

A: Dr. Barr: What we wanted to do from the very beginning was make it very pithy. It was leading-edge stuff…and we had a lot more information that was going to go fit in there.

Dr. Jedlicka: And it’s still going strong. It’s easy to just spend a couple of minutes and feel like you’re up to date on something new and what’s going on in the industry. It’s a great tool for us.

Q: Dr. Jedlicka: Let’s talk about the Global Specialty Lens Symposium (GSLS). At what point did you say, “We need to evolve into something new and to the format that it’s in today”?

A: Dr. Barr: I give a lot of credit to the publishers who were looking at these vision [conferences], and they said, “We need to make sure that contact lenses are in the forefront in this,” because they were very much ophthalmic and spectacle meetings. People obviously wanted it because you wrapped CE around it. The industry really wanted that as well. So, the publishers, the leading clinicians, and advertisers were more in sync there.

Dr. Jedlicka: GSLS brings the people together not only for the education but also for networking. That is one of the reasons why specialty contact lenses are such a growing interest of specialization. People enjoy it because they have an opportunity to see the impact of it from their peers.

Dr. Barr: I always thought the best part of those meetings was not the formal or the planned but the unplanned, where you run into somebody, and they’ve got an idea they want to pitch to you. The “who’s who” is there, and they want everybody to know what they’re thinking and to pick people’s brains.

Q: Dr. Jedlicka: When we think about the future of contact lenses, we think about using them for vision correction, because that’s what they’ve always been used for, for the most part. But there’s this whole other field, too, of contact lenses as high-tech devices. First, let’s talk about traditional vision-correcting lenses.

A: Dr. Barr: We are trying to leverage the anatomy of the eye and come up with better vision for presbyopia. No matter how someone does that, we need that. The presbyopes who want to continue in contact lens wear, they’re more able to now because the lenses work better, material- and solution-wise.

There’s this whole business of how we get spectacles and the contact lens to work together. We’ve seen a number of these linked systems, and it’s not working yet. I hope it does. It’s a big challenge. [Imagine that] my daughter is trying to reach me with a text, and I can have my spectacles on and my contact lens, and they can work together, and I just look up in the corner of my eye instead of at my phone and see what the issue is. But we’ve got a ways to go there.

Dr. Jedlicka: Presbyopia really is the area where we still have much to improve on traditional contact lenses. Our vision systems just aren’t that good. They’re not that developed, and that’s a huge area in which we’ve still just barely made inroads.

Q: Dr. Jedlicka: What other areas are we overlooking with our current lenses and how we prescribe them?

A: Dr. Barr: What we do now with most soft lenses is we “strangle” the eye. They’re actually deeper than the eye, right? So, getting tear flow is a really good idea for a lot of reasons. Can we get better vision, but, also, can we get better health? I think we can get better health. We’ve gone as far as we can with making solutions better and getting comfort. Now we’ve got to get comfort and oxygen.

Q: Dr. Jedlicka: I agree with you. We had to be cautious about the all-out fight for initial comfort versus the long-term wearability of lenses. There’s a balance there, and you can make a lens very comfortable right out of the package, but whether that patient will still feel like their lenses are comfortable a year from now is a whole other question.

A: Dr. Barr: To do that, as you describe it, that’s daily disposable and the best scenario now.

Q: Dr. Jedlicka: I agree, but again, without making that initial comfort—by making it exceedingly tight and exceedingly deep, makes it good at first—but is it good in the long run?I love the idea of new developments, particularly in presbyopia. We look at specialty contact lenses and the way ortho-k and scleral lenses are happening. If we come up with some innovation in presbyopia, that’s a whole other category of growth that’s waiting for all of us who want to practice specialty lenses.

A: Dr. Barr: Yeah, I’m going to be 70 this year, and it doesn’t seem as old as it used to. People are more active at an older age, I think, than they used to be. And they’re active in a lot of things. I like to play golf now a lot, so we need to have contact lenses work in all those situations and on an aging eye as well. CLS

CATCH CLS LIVE! Watch this livestream’s full interview—and catch past and future episodes in the series via the online version of Contact Lens Spectrum at clspectrum.com or our Facebook or LinkedIn pages. Additionally, you can subscribe to Contact Lens Spectrum’s YouTube channel (bit.ly/clsyoutube22 ) to view this and other past interviews and to receive notifications for upcoming ones.