Through our international research partnerships, our patients are some of the first in the world to benefit from life-changing devices and procedures.
Clinical Trials
Auckland Eye has been performing clinical trials for over 15 years, though the last 7 years have seen a huge increase in the number of trials we have been involved in.
Auckland Eye has been engaged in trials for new medications, such as the initial glaucoma studies 15 years ago, through to more recent trials in new devices.
We are proud to say that many of the trials we have been involved with have had very successful outcomes:
- The Acufocus trial (a corneal inlay to treat presbyopia) was a huge undertaking and we were part of the international team that helped make this product commercially available worldwide, achieving FDA approval in April 2015.
- Auckland Eye were the first to recruit a patient in the Oculeve clinical trial, a new device for the relief from dry eye. We recruited the highest number of participants in Australasia. Oculeve is now also FDA approved.
Auckland Eye is committed to continuing participation in international and national clinical trials with a view to:
- Helping to develop promising medicines, and surgeries so that successful products can be more easily accessed by patients in NZ and around the world.
- Allowing patients who cannot otherwise afford potentially beneficial surgeries or medicines access to these technologies through a robust and ethics approved process.
- Ensuring surgeons at Auckland Eye keep at the crest of the wave to deliver the best and most effective treatments available worldwide.
Update on the trials Auckland Eye team have done:
- In 2016 Auckland Eye were the first to put new intraocular lens (from Tecnis Symfony range of IOLs) through clinical trials, which later were FDA approved. Tecnis Symfony is unique and has a patented diffractive echlette (or blazed grating) design feature, which extends the range of vision the IOL affects, and its achromatic technology, which corrects chromatic aberration for enhanced contrast sensitivity. Dr Dean Corbett was proudly involved in this clinical study. Please read more on this here
- In 2013 Auckland Eye did the “Oculeve Dry Eye Study.” This involved the use of electrical stimulation to the inside of the nose hoping to stimulate production of the natural tears hence helping the dry eye symptoms. This electrical stimulation device is now called True Tears and has been approved by US FDA for marketing. We are very happy and pleased to be involved in the trial of this innovative device.
