One of the many annoyances of aging is presbyopia. As you get older, your eye's lens loses elasticity, making it more difficult to focus light on the retina for near tasks. Reading bottle labels (or worse, books) becomes impossible. For designers who do detailed sketching or work on fine models, it's a nightmare. The only fix is reading glasses.

Perhaps that will change. The FDA has just approved VIZZ, an eyedrop solution that clears up presbyopia. After an application, it takes about 30 minutes to kick in, then improves your near-sight vision—notably, without screwing up your far-sight vision—for up to 10 hours.

The drug doesn't improve your lens' elasticity; instead it causes your iris' sphincter muscle to contract, causing a pinhole effect that extends your depth of focus and improves near-sight vision. In essence, it's gaming the eye, and whether this has long-term negative side effects remains to be seen.

For their part VIZZ's developer, pharma company LENZ Therapeutics, says "VIZZ was well-tolerated with no serious treatment-related adverse events observed in the over 30,000 treatment days across [three trials]. The most common reported adverse reactions of participants were installation site irritation, dim vision and headache. The majority of adverse reactions were mild, transient and self-resolving." As presbyopia affects just about everyone over the age of 45, I'm guessing few will hesitate to try out these wonder eyedrops, adverse reactions aside.

VIZZ is meant to be applied once per day. It will require a prescription and should be widely available "by mid-Q4 2025."