Key takeaways:
* The FDA approved the first gene therapy for severe hemophilia A,marking a significant advancement in treatment options.
* The therapy, marketed as Hemgenix, offers a potential one-time treatment to reduce or eliminate the need for regular factor VIII infusions.
* Hemgenix carries a high list price of $3.5 million, raising concerns about accessibility and affordability.
* The approval is based on clinical trial data demonstrating Hemgenix’s ability to substantially reduce annualized bleeding rates.
* While Hemgenix represents a breakthrough, ongoing monitoring for long-term safety and efficacy is crucial.
# new Device Offers Naturalistic Blink Assessment for Dry Eye Research
A new device utilizing video-based analysis offers a less invasive and more naturalistic method for assessing blink patterns, potentially improving research and clinical tools for conditions like dry eye disease.Researchers at the University of Waterloo developed software that reanalyzes data from a commercially available eye-tracking device to provide detailed metrics on blink characteristics.
The device measures the eyelid aperture opening at about 200 frames per second, according to Read.
“This was of great interest to us because we’ve been looking at an algorithm [for] laboratory-based imaging of the eyelids,” Read said. “In the laboratory, you’ve got people on chin rests and all the rest, and it’s rather invasive, so you can’t really reassure yourself that it’s a very natural blinking habitat.”
To gauge how well the device was measuring blinks, Read and colleagues conducted a study in 10 healthy individuals. Each participant wore the device for two 5-minute activities on a laptop: playing a Tetris game and watching a nature documentary. The researchers compared their algorithm’s analysis of blinks in each scenario to see if it gave the expected output: lower blink quality in the cognitively demanding game task and higher blink quality in the passive viewing task.
“What our software does is it takes that output of that commercial instrument, reanalyzes it, identifies every single one of those blinks and then … [breaks] that down into the closing phase … and the opening phase … and then we can get a whole load of metrics from this,” Read said.
According to the results, the participants blinked every 7 seconds on average while playing the game, whereas they blinked every 2 seconds while watching the documentary.
“They’re so busy trying to get those [tetris] shapes in, they’re … subconsciously shortening their blinks significantly. The amplitude is shorter.The blink completeness is worse,” Read said. “In contrast,with the documentary,we were seeing larger amplitudes,more complete blinking,and the velocity of the lids was higher. Normally when you have larger amplitude, you have larger velocity, and that’s indeed what we saw.”
The results suggest that the device helps mitigate the distracting, invasive aspects of laboratory assessments, making the process “so much more natural,” Read said.
“We think this could be versatile for research but also,down the road,a clinical tool to generate blink-based biomarkers for dry eye disease.