A SPIRIT OF ENTREPRENEURIALISM is at the heart of all new technology. This is particularly true in eye care and in the field of contact lenses. F.A. Müller. Adolf Fick. William Feinbloom. Kevin Tuohy. Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lím. Newton Wesley and George Jessen. All names that made indelible and significant impacts on the field of contact lenses, thus changing patients’ lives forever.

Take scleral lenses, for example. Scleral lenses, initially made from glass, were first introduced in the late 1800s nearly simultaneously by Müller and Fick. As we all know, while glass has many beneficial optical properties, it has no oxygen permeability and is also a safety hazard to the ocular surface. Scleral lenses were all practitioners had through nearly the first half of the last century. In the mid-1900s, polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) was introduced to the market. And while safety may have been improved, PMMA, like glass, has no oxygen permeability. So, Tuohy innovated by designing the corneal contact lens, which provides better tear exchange than scleral lenses.

In the 1970s and 1980s, rigid lens materials advanced such that scientists learned how to make oxygen-permeable materials that could be used in contact lenses. Yet, progress happened incrementally, such that modern rigid lens materials did not evolve sufficiently until the 2000s such that they could be incorporated into scleral lenses (with advanced parameter designs). So, then we saw the birth of the modern scleral lenses, which help hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide who have mild and severe ocular surface diseases.

Our field sees innovations occurring nearly every time we turn around. It seems like each meeting that we attend is filled with new innovations to help our patients. And the entrepreneurial spirit is indeed still behind these advanced technologies. As the saying goes, “The greatest risk in life is not taking one,” and, boy, is that right!