Scientists Develop Laser-Free Vision Correction Using Electrical Mold

For millions of people, clear vision depends on glasses, contact lenses, or a trip to the surgical suite for LASIK. The procedure works—a laser precisely removes corneal tissue to reshape the eye's light-focusing surface—but it is still, fundamentally, tissue removal. What if the cornea could be reshaped without cutting anything away at all?

Chemist Michael Hill of Occidental College and surgeon Brian Wong of the University of California, Irvine, have been testing that premise using a platinum mold shaped like a contact lens and a small electrical charge. In their early experiments, isolated rabbit eyeballs conformed to the mold's shape in roughly a minute. All ten eyes that received a correction designed for nearsightedness achieved the targeted focusing power. The work, presented at the American Chemical Society's fall meeting in August 2025, describes what Hill calls electromechanical reshaping, or EMR—a fundamentally different approach to the same problem LASIK solves.

The cornea is transparent and curved, bending incoming light to focus it onto the retina. Change that curve, and you change how light travels through the eye, altering what the person can see clearly. LASIK accomplishes this by vaporizing precise amounts of tissue with a laser. Hill's method works differently. It exploits a property of collagen-rich tissues like the cornea: oppositely charged components attract each other, helping maintain the tissue's structure. Because the cornea contains water, applying electrical current alters the chemical environment. Specifically, the researchers lower the tissue's pH, making it more acidic and loosening some of the interactions that keep it rigid. During this window, the cornea becomes soft enough to conform to a mold. When the pH returns to normal, those interactions restore themselves, and the tissue holds its new shape. No material is removed. "LASIK is just a fancy way of doing traditional surgery," Hill said. "It's still carving tissue—it's just carving with a laser."

The discovery came partly by accident. Wong was investigating living tissues as moldable materials when he stumbled onto this chemical modification process. To control it, the researchers built specialized platinum contact lenses, each carrying the exact curvature they wanted the cornea to adopt. These lenses also functioned as electrodes, allowing the team to apply the electrical potential. A single device, in other words, both initiated the chemical change and determined the resulting shape. In the lab, they placed rabbit eyeballs in a saline solution mimicking natural tears, positioned the platinum lenses over them, and applied a small electrical potential. The controlled pH change allowed the corneas to match the lenses' curvature. Cross-sectional images showed the original corneal profile as a white line and the flattened shape achieved after treatment as a yellow line. The reshaping took roughly sixty seconds.

Out of twelve isolated rabbit eyeballs tested, ten received a correction intended for myopia. All ten reached the desired focusing power, indicating their optical properties had changed as intended. Cell survival was another consideration—the team carefully controlled the pH gradient to keep cells alive, and the early results were encouraging. Separate experiments also suggested the technique might reverse some chemically induced corneal cloudiness, opening another avenue for future work. The researchers had previously explored EMR in rabbit ears and in pig skin and scars.

But there are significant gaps between what has been demonstrated and what would be needed for clinical use. These experiments used eyes removed from animals, so they do not show whether the reshaping improves vision in a living rabbit or person. How long the reshaping would last, how living eyes would respond, and whether the technique could correct farsightedness and astigmatism all remain unanswered. The team planned to test EMR in living rabbits and determine the range of corrections possible, but funding uncertainty had put those steps on hold. The announcement does not clarify whether those experiments have since begun.

If the technique reaches the clinic, Hill suggests it could require fewer steps and less expensive equipment than LASIK, and might even be reversible. "There's a long road between what we've done and the clinic," he said. "But, if we get there, this technique is widely applicable, vastly cheaper and potentially even reversible." For now, reshaping the eye without removing tissue remains an intriguing possibility—one that will require years of further testing to determine whether it becomes a practical alternative to the laser surgery that has dominated vision correction for decades.