The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the first eye drop that could allow users to ditch their bifocals—or at least rely on them far less often. Developed by the pharmaceutical company LENZ, VIZZ is an aceclidine ophthalmic treatment in the form of once-daily drops that ease near-object blurriness for up to 10 hours. But unlike similar eye drops that arrived in recent years, VIZZ appears to avoid annoying side effects and rare medical complications.
Presbyopia is a common variant of farsightedness affecting over 128 million people in the US, including the majority of adults over the age of 45. It’s often an inevitable consequence of time—your eyes’ lenses naturally harden as you get older, making it increasingly difficult for the optical muscles to adjust between focal points.
The usual solutions to the issue are either picking up a pair of reading glasses, or swapping your daily lenses or contact lenses for bifocals. But in 2021, the FDA approved a breakthrough eye drop treatment called Vuity, which uses pilocarpine hydrochloride to stimulate the pupil to contract. This increases depth of field and clears up otherwise blurry books, computer screens, and text messages.
There are a couple tradeoffs when using Vuity, however. Because of its effects on the ciliary muscle responsible for focusing, a user’s sight may dim slightly while distant objects become blurry. Meanwhile, users sometimes reported side effects including brow heaviness. In rare cases, they cited vitreoretinal issues, or problems with the retina and vitreous fluid at the back of the eye.
VIZZ doesn’t present the same complications because it uses aceclidine instead of pilocarpine hydrochloride. Rather than significantly stimulating the ciliary muscle, VIZZ only affects the pupils while avoiding the other problems. The FDA’s approval was announced after the results from three randomized, double-masked, controlled Phase II studies involving hundreds of volunteers. Participants didn’t report any serious issues across the over 30,000 cumulative treatment days.
VIZZ’s manufacturer aims to have the eye drops widely available through prescription by the fourth quarter of 2025.
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