Eye drops to treat cataracts

Cataracts are caused when proteins inside the lens of the eye come together. It's a condition that clouds the vision of approximately one hundred and eighty million people worldwide, with surgery to replace the lens with a plastic one currently the only solution. Twenty million sufferers around the world are blind because they cannot access surgical treatments. But help could be on it's way, as a potential non-surgical treatment method has been described in the journal Science this week. It follows another advancement in cataract science published recently in Nature. Roy Quinlan from the University of Durham, whose perspectives article on the subject has been published alongside the research paper, talks to Rosalind Davies about how important these new findings could be.