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Artificial Retinal Devices Help The Blind To See

Worldwide rates of all diseases that cause blindness are expected to double by 2020 due to the aging population, making this an area ripe for medical device innovation. A multibillion-dollar market has been built around the surgical correction of "front of the eye" age-related vision disorders such as presbyopia, but the technological evolution in ophthalmology has now reached the back of the eye. Artificial retinal prostheses are an increasingly popular area of investigation. Start-ups hoping to enter this market face daunting R&D, clinical and regulatory hurdles, and will require significant resources. We profile three such companies in this issue: 2C Tech Corp., LambdaVision and Nano Retina.

Degenerative ophthalmic diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and retinitis pigmentosa (RP) are leading causes of blindness worldwide. Associated with aging, these retinal conditions are twice as prevalent as Alzheimer's disease, affecting at least 30 million people worldwide, most over 60 years of age, according to AMD Alliance International. Globally, the direct and indirect cost of visual impairment due to these diseases was estimated at $343 billion in 2010, according to this same source. Although drugs have been developed that help to slow wet AMD disease progression (a form of AMD that affects just 10% of patients), and recently, devices have emerged to improve vision for dry AMD (the other 90% of patients), currently there are no medical or surgical treatments that can provide a cure. With worldwide rates of all diseases that cause blindness expected to double by 2020 due to the aging population, this is an area ripe for medical device innovation.

A multibillion-dollar market has been built around the surgical correction of "front of the eye" age-related vision disorders such as presbyopia, with laser vision correction and the development of next-generation...

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