Cooling Anesthesia for Intravitreal Injection

Intravitreal injections have become the standard of care for administering medications for retinal diseases such as age related macular degeneration and diabetic macular edema. There is considerable apprehension among patients receiving these injections, primarily revolving around adequate anesthesia during the injection. Current methods of anesthesia involve topical anesthetic drops, lidocaine gels, or subconjunctival injections of lidocaine, which suffer from either poor anesthetic effect, corneal irritation, or subconjunctival hemorrhage, as well as significant time for the onset of anesthesia. Recens Medical has developed a novel medical device which can precisely and rapidly cool the surface of the eye This device cools to a temperature around -5 to -10 degrees Celsius, about the temperature of a cold ice cube, and thus has an excellent safety profile compared to conventional ophthalmic cryotherapy units. The value of such a device is both improved patient comfort, as well as increased efficiency and workflow for retina specialists administering intravitreal injections. This device has been extensively tested in animal safety studies as well as pilot human studies and has not demonstrated any serious adverse effects and has shown anesthetic effects comparable to current standard of care. This dose escalation study will test various temperatures and duration of temperatures to evaluate for safety as well as determine the optimal temperature for anesthesia during intravitreal injection.