It may still function as a lens, but it would not function correctly. Of course the aperture and focusing helicoil would no longer work, as well as any other internal mechanisms. Also, I don't know if any acrylic resin would get inside the lens.
But lets assume we can avoid all of that by using a simple lens, like a magnifying glass. Even then, it wouldn't work correctly because the way a lens works is by the refraction of light as it passes from one medium to another. It's not the material of the lens that causes light to bend and be focused, but the transition between materials. When you coat the outside of the lens in acrylic, you're changing the refraction of the lens. So now the light has to pass through not just air, but acrylic, and that will change how the lens focuses light. For the lens to work properly, it's formula depends on air being the medium outside the glass elements. This is why underwater lenses sometimes won't focus properly on land, because they were designed for water to be the medium they're surrounded by. Now, you could put the lens in a hollow acrylic box, and it would function properly assuming the acrylic walls were of equal thickness throughout. That would work because the refraction of the light rays through the acrylic medium would be consistent no matter where they passed. That's why lens filters don't effect how a lens focuses (other than by filtering out certain wavelengths because no lens can focus all wavelengths simultaneously to the same point, which is what causes chromatic aberration). If you submerged a lens in acrylic resin, the resin would take on the negative shape of the lens and effect it's ability to focus light. It might still focus light to some degree, but it wouldn't focus light the same, and may or may not be usable.
. Much cheaper than embedding your lens in acrylic
