Ciba Protek vs. Vistakon One-Day Acuvue: A comparison of antibiotic reservoir and delivery effects

Since the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of hydrophilic lenses as ocular bandages in 1973, they have become the treatment of choice for many corneal problems, not the least being superficial corneal abrasions. Practitioners are opting for the more readily available disposable soft contact lenses because of the limited number of expensive therapeutically approved bandage soft contact lenses. In this study we set out to determine if there is a significant difference in the antibiotic reservoir and delivery effect of these two groups of soft contact lenses. The eyes in this study were divided into three groups: Protek® group, Acuvue® group and control group. Two drops of Tobramycin 0.3% solution were instilled into each eye followed by subsequent isolation of tear samples using diffusion disks. The relative amount of antibiotic in the tears at certain time intervals was inferred using kill zone ring width (KZRW) measures around the diffusion disks. The data were then analyzed using an ANOVA statistical test. From this analysis we found that while there was a significant difference in KZRW between both Protek® versus control and Acuvue® versus control, there was no significant difference between Protek® versus Acuvue®. This study shows that, when used as an antibiotic reservoir and delivery system, the Ciba Protek® therapeutic contact lens and One-day Acuvue® disposable contact lens behave very similarly