If you were waiting for the contact lenses that could measure your blood sugar; we have sad news.
Verily just announced in a blog post by CTO Dr. Brian Otis that it has decided along with partner Alcon to put its glucose-sensing contact lens “on hold.” After a call with Verily leadership – including Dr. Otis and Diabetes Clinical Lead Dr. Howard Zisser – the approach proved technically infeasible and we will likely not ever see a glucose-sensing lens from Verily. The companies have furtively conducted a slew of clinical studies using various iterations of the lens in diverse populations, collecting “hundreds of thousands of biological data points” along the way; though the team was wary of prematurely giving up on the project, the body of evidence eventually pointed toward cancelling the glucose-sensing lens program. Given that we hadn’t heard a formal update on the program since a Reuters article in late 2016 and there was baseline skepticism on the feasibility of reliably monitoring glucose from the eye, this news does not come as a huge surprise.