Development of environmentally friendly soft contact lenses made from cellulose-derived hydrogel materials

With the performance improvement of soft contact lenses (SCLs) over the past few decades, their global use and market have steadily expanded. Consequently, contamination by disposable SCLs has become a potential threat to the environment. From the perspective of sustainable development goals, overcoming this issue requires the development of new biodegradable SCL materials based on plant-derived cellulose. In this study, highly transparent hydrogels based on hydroxypropyl cellulose were prepared via a radiation crosslinking technique using electron beams. By optimizing the irradiation dose and type of added monomer, excellent physicochemical properties, such as mechanical strength and transparency, and biological properties, such as low lysozyme deposition and biodegradability, were obtained. Thus, hydrogels produced by radiation crosslinking can be potentially used as human- and environment-friendly SCL materials.