Ow!
A new drug to help fight macular degeneration has been approved by the FDA. The only catch? It has to be injected directly into the eye:
“It is something that, in the end for most people, is not frightening, is not painful and is not intimidating,” said [Dr. Brian] Leonard.
Uh-huh. Another illustration of the fact that you can have the most wonderful drug in the world, but if you don’t have a good way of dosing it, you’re up a creek. It’s a long way (biochemically speaking) from the stomach to the head if you’re trying to get a drug up there that does something specific to your eyeballs.
The inject-the-drug-right-in-the-eye thing reminds me of a Parkinsons drug in development which required it to be directly injected into the brain (and it didn’t wind up working very well anyway.)
Now imagine if Viagra had to be administered by injection.[*]
[*]You don’t have to imagine! Before Viagra came along there were several anti-impotence drugs that worked by injecting them “into a specific area of the penis”, one of which requires “pressure on the injection site for 5 minutes, or until the bleeding stops.” Yikes!