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“Even when I went to Las Vegas on vacation, standing there in front of the Treasure Island Casino, I had an idea for how I could make a better bifocal design,” he said.In fact, another company Dr. Seidner launched, LifeStyle (now run by his son), made the first disposable bifocal lenses. A joint venture with DuPont resulted in one of the early silicone hydrogel designs, which was later sold to a major manufacturer.Now retired from active practice, Dr. Seidner continues to work on a new contact lens that he says could take multifocal lenses from specialty to mainstream.Shortly after the Polycon lens was introduced, two other new entrants further expanded the fledgling RGP field. Don Ratkowski, founder of Paragon Vision Sciences, developed the Paraperm series of materials, and Perry Rosenthal, M.D., introduced the first Boston RGP material. An ophthalmologist who became fascinated with contact lenses and founded a company (Polymer Technology Corporation) to make them, Dr. Rosenthal is best known for his more recent endeavors fitting therapeutic Boston Scleral Lenses for patients with keratoconus, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, and other corneal diseases at his Boston Foundation for Sight.Ultimately, a hyper-permeable lens, Menicon Z (Menicon) was introduced with FDA approval for up to 30 days of continuous wear.The late 1980s was a time of tremendous growth and innovation in RGP lenses. Edward S. Bennett, O.D., M.S.Ed., who had worked under Dr. Borish and Sarita Soni, O.D., as a clinical investigator for the Polycon lens, co-authored an important textbook, Rigid Gas Permeable Contact Lenses, with Robert Grohe, O.D., that was published in 1986. By 1988, Dr. Bennett was executive director of the recently founded GP Lens Institute1980sScientists introduce disinfectants using PHMB and polyquad preservatives.These include Alcon’s OptiFree line and Bausch & Lomb’s ReNu. (GPLI), a position he still holds. GPLI is the education arm of the CLMA and, as such, is the leading source for publications, symposia, advice and other educational resources related to RGP lenses.Reverse-geometry lens designs, introduced in the late 1980s for post-RK patients, helped create a resurgence in the modality of orthokeratology. The concept of ortho-keratology had been introduced decades before by George Jessen, O.D., and advanced by pioneering optometrists such as Charles May, O.D.; Stuart Grant, O.D.; and Roger Tabb, O.D., but correcting myopia in this fashion was slow and impractical.The first modern orthokeratology design, the Contex OK lens, utilized a reverse curve, which greatly accelerated the time required to reduce a patient’s myopia. This was first reported by Richard Wlodyga, O.D.; the first book addressing orthokeratology followed a few years later, authored by Rodger T. Kame, O.D.(1938-2000), and Todd Winkler, O.D.New RGP bifocal designs in the late 1980s also led to an innovation boom that continues to this day. Specifically, the introduction of the Tangent Streak segmented translating bifocal represented the first opportunity to eliminate the problem of “image jump” that had plagued previous GP segmented bifocals. Dr. Bennett believes the presbyopia market is one area in which GP lenses will shine in the future. “If we look back historically, there were many PMMA bifocal lenses that worked really well, except that they didn’t provide enough oxygen to the cornea.
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