A staff on the College of Waterloo has constructed a digital manufacturing system that prints {custom} contact lenses in roughly 20 minutes, elevating the prospect {that a} affected person might be measured, have a lens designed, and stroll out carrying it after one clinic go to.
The strategy pairs a purpose-built silicone materials with additive manufacturing, and it earned a Gold Medal on the Shanghai Worldwide Exhibition of Innovations in June 2026.
Changing weeks of fittings with a same-day workflow
The majority of contact lenses available on the market are produced in a set set of normal sizes and shapes relatively than formed to the person eye. Delicate lenses work effectively sufficient for a big share of wearers, however individuals whose corneas are irregularly formed ceaselessly want inflexible lenses to see clearly, and dialing within the right match for these lenses can stretch throughout a number of appointments over weeks and even months.
The Waterloo platform, developed within the college’s Division of Chemistry, is designed to compress that cycle. It ties collectively three parts: software program that designs every lens, a novel silicone formulation, and the printing and ending steps that flip a design right into a wearable product.
“We’re very enthusiastic about this work as a result of it brings us nearer to contact lenses which might be actually personalised,” mentioned Dr. Shirley Tang, professor in Waterloo’s Division of Chemistry. “Our know-how produces lenses with patient-specific surfaces for a exact match whereas delivering the optical readability and mechanical efficiency anticipated of business contact lenses.”
Reformulating silicone so it may be printed
Silicone is a mainstay of contact lens manufacturing as a result of it’s secure for the physique, effectively tolerated, and lets a excessive quantity of oxygen attain the attention. The catch is that commonplace silicone doesn’t lend itself to additive manufacturing. The Waterloo group bought round that by creating a brand new water-friendly silicone recipe tailor-made for printing whereas nonetheless holding onto the traits a lens wants.
The design software program handles the 2 sides of the lens individually. “Our software program designs a lens with an interior floor that exactly matches the affected person’s cornea and an outer floor that gives the required imaginative and prescient correction,” mentioned Dr. Sayan Ganguly, a chemistry analysis affiliate at Waterloo. “The novel hydrophilic silicone materials we created, mixed with our manufacturing course of, produces easy, clear lenses which might be comfy to put on.”
Something constructed up layer by layer tends to indicate faint stair-step ridges on curved surfaces, and on a lens these ridges can blur imaginative and prescient and irritate the attention. To counter it, the researchers created an ultra-thin, non-contact coating step that evens out the floor with out disturbing the lens’s tailor-made geometry or degrading its optics.
Lab checks point out the lenses are biocompatible, and the staff is gearing up for in-vivo trials. A provisional patent has been filed on the hydrophilic silicone, with a full utility within the works.
The group can also be collaborating with the Centre for Imaginative and prescient and Eye Analysis, a joint institute run by Waterloo and the Hong Kong Polytechnic College, to push the know-how towards market.
The research was led by Sayan Ganguly serving as lead writer, alongside co-authors Astrid Stinson and Fatemeh Parniani, and senior writer Xiaowu Shirley Tang, who supervised the undertaking. The work was supported by two grants from the Pure Sciences and Engineering Analysis Council (NSERC) of Canada awarded to Tang, with further funding from Hong Kong’s InnoHK initiative. Their research, “Affected person-specific laborious contact lenses fabricated by vat photopolymerization printing and non-contact fluidization coating,” appeared in Supplies & Design.
Limits and challenges
The know-how continues to be at an early stage, and some sensible gaps stay. The coating smooths the printer’s tiny “stair-step” ridges however doesn’t take away them utterly, dropping the step top from about 5 microns to roughly 1.2 microns. The lenses let by sufficient oxygen to qualify as inflexible gas-permeable, although not as a lot as one of the best merchandise available on the market. And at 12 minutes to print a lens, 15 to twenty minutes with washing and coating, the method nonetheless has to show it could actually run reliably at scale.
The larger hurdles are scientific. Up to now the lenses have solely been examined within the lab and on cultured cells, by no means worn on an actual eye, so consolation and long-term security are nonetheless unknown. The staff additionally has to run in-eye trials, safe regulatory approval, and line up manufacturing companions earlier than the lenses might attain an optometrist. For now, the 20-minute lens is a promising proof of idea relatively than one thing sufferers can use.
Why decentralizing the lens manufacturing unit is the true prize
Waterloo’s play is much less a few single quicker printer and extra about relocating manufacturing to the place the affected person already is. The staff is concentrating on the specialty and rigid-lens phase that immediately relies on repeat visits and off-site fabrication, the slice of the market the place commonplace molds fail individuals with keratoconus, scarring, or in any other case atypical corneas.
The ambition echoes earlier strikes. Netherlands-based Luxexcel superior its additive course of for ophthalmic lenses from a pilot stage to delivery business lenses every day from ISO-certified platforms put in throughout the US and Europe, positioning printing as a option to sidestep the roughly 80% of fabric wasted in typical grind-and-polish lens making. Its VisionPlatform mixed industrial printers, lens-design software program, and workflow instruments to end up lenses assembly ANSI, ISO, and FDA requirements in a single step.
The optical-quality hurdle Waterloo tackles has additionally drawn different labs. Researchers at Northwestern’s McCormick College of Engineering constructed a technique for printing high-quality optical lenses and ran straight into the identical impediment. Their first printed lens confirmed seen stepping as a result of a typical layer thickness of about 5 microns dwarfs the roughly 0.5-micron wavelength of seen gentle, leaving a floor too tough for clear imaginative and prescient. The group noticed the method feeding into custom-made contact lenses for individuals with corneas distorted by keratoconus.
The path is evident: lens making is shifting out of the manufacturing unit and into the clinic. Waterloo’s printable silicone and smoothing step push that shift ahead. What occurs in scientific trials will resolve whether or not same-day lenses grow to be commonplace.
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Featured picture reveals 3D printed contact lenses. Picture by way of College of Waterloo/Jay Mielke.
