COMPANY SEES SUCCESS AND FUNDING
IN HELPING TO GIVE SIGHT TO THE BLIND

By Peg Brickley
Small Times Correspondent

April 11, 2002 -
Optobionics Inc.,
one of three U.S.-based developers of retinal replacement technology,
appears to be gaining ground in the race to produce the first microscopic
system to
help the blind see.

The Illinois-based private firm picked up $20 million in new funding earlier
this year and is readying an article for one of the scientific journals that
are the chosen

forum for announcing big scientific news. What that news is, Optobionics
will not say.

But the latest round of investment valued the 12-person company at $100
million, according to Alan Chow. A pediatric ophthalmologist, he founded
Optobionics
with his brother, Vincent, an electrical engineer.

Brian Chee,
a partner in the Seattle office of Polaris Venture Partners, said his firm
made "a huge bet" on Optobionics, which he said had "an elegant solution
combining
silicon and biology."

"In order to get that kind of money, especially in this environment,
Optobionics definitely made a strong showing of future promise," said Scott
Maece,
an executive at corporate backer
Ciba Vision,
based outside of Atlanta.

Optobionics has "numerous national and international patents" to back that
valuation up, Chow said. The company also has news coming out soon that is
likely
to impress the scientific community.

In the past two years the company implanted microphotodiode-equipped chips
into the back of the eyes of half a dozen blind people in FDA-approved
safety
tests.

The Optobionics artificial retina is a chip about 2 millimeters in diameter,
holding about 3,500 light-sensors that convert light energy to electrical
signals,
mimicking the eye's own photoreceptors. When tucked into a pocket behind
still-active cells in damaged retinas, the microphotodiodes are supposed to
stimulate
the live portions of the retina to "see."

The company, which is working with MEMS specialists, has so far given only
limited information on the results of the surgeries, citing FDA rules for
early
clinical trials.

"There has been no infection, no inflammation, no degradation," said David
McComb, chief information officer at Optobionics. "In effect, the patients
are
tolerating the devices and the devices are tolerating the patients."

But the evidence of $20 million in new venture cash, the addition of a new
corporate backer,
Medtronic Inc.,
to the roster of investors and the planned journal publication suggest the
news out of the first small trial will be pretty good.

A team from Optobionics is slated to talk about the safety, feasibility and
efficacy of the company's artificial silicon retinal prosthesis in less than
a month, when the
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
holds its annual meeting in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Chow and doctors from
Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans and Rush-Presbyterian
St. Luke's
Medical Center in Chicago will tell what the technology has shown in the
first small group of test subjects, people blinded by retinitis pigmentosa.

"RP," as it is known to eye doctors, is one of a number of pathologies that
blind by attacking the rods and cones that make up the natural array of
light
sensors in the human retina.

Optobionics is one of a number of companies concocting technologies to
counter those diseases. Besides the Midwestern private venture, there are
university-based
teams on both the East and West coasts working on systems to transmit images
to the brain when diseased retinal tissues are no longer up to the task.

At the University of Southern California's
Doheny Eye Institute,
a synthetic retina is headed to clinical trials soon, the product of work
that began at the
Wilmer Eye Institute
at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Most of the Wilmer synthetic retina
team left late last year to continue the work at USC. Led by Mark S. Humayun
and Eugene de Juan Jr., the team now operates out of the Doheny Retina
Institute and works with Second Sight, a Valencia, Calif. firm.

Unlike the Optobionics implant, the Doheny design involves an external
camera that sends signals to a receptor array on a chip implanted near the
ganglion
cells, which send signals to the brain.

The system is similar to one that has been in the works for years at the
Harvard-M.I.T. Retinal Implant Project.
The East Coast academics are tapping the
Cornell Nanofabrication Facility
for technical expertise for their design, which aims to put as much of the
burden as possible on external cameras, computers and transmitters.

With FDA approval, the Harvard-MIT group has conducted very early stage
experiments with human volunteers who, awake on the operating table,
answered questions
about what they thought they "saw" via a simple system of wireless
transmission and microchip.

Douglas B. Shire of the Cornell nanofabrication facility cited the
difficulty of getting electronic circuits to operate in the saline
environment of the
eye as a major hurdle.

"We need to protect the circuitry in the implant from the body environment
and vice versa," Shire said. "We need a biocompatible coating that will
withstand
the eye environment, which is a salty sort of liquid."

Biocompatibility is one reason Optobionics puts its chip behind the eye,
instead of next to the neurons, where the Harvard-MIT and USC designers plan
to
place it, Chow explained.

"The placement of the device in the subretinal space protects it somewhat
from that attack," the ophthalmologist said. "It's a relatively dry
environment,
as opposed to placement in the vitreous cavity, where essentially it has to
operate in sea water."

Shire, an electrical engineer who cut his teeth on microelectronics in the
Silicon Valley, said his team was still testing to find the ideal electrode
size.

"The key factor in the design of the implant is minimizing the amount of
power that can be used, because there's a limited budget as far as power is
concerned,"
Shire said.

"In turn, that limits the size of the stimulating array that conveys
information to the patient, because obviously a larger array would consume
more power."

And what is Optobionics' answer to questions about whether its implanted
array has enough power to transmit images using only the light that enters
the
eye, rather than external cameras, computers and transmitters? Chow would
only say that the information is proprietary.

Meanwhile, experiments in size and materials continue in the hunt for the
best formulation for the microphotodiodes to do their work of converting
photons
of light into electricity to signal the brain without corroding. But it
appears that the future of synthetic retinas is hooked to the next wave of
developments
in chip fabrication and nanotechnology.

Tests at the Cornell nanofabrication facility indicate that electrodes with
diameters over 300 microns will carry the image best. However, a January
presentation
at the MEMS 2002 conference by Second Sight involved conducting posts
one-tenth that diameter incorporated onto a chip surface.

When it comes to synthetic retina components, hopes are that smaller, more
sophisticated structures will deliver the finest resolution at the smallest
cost
in power.

Reprints of this article are available
here.

courtesy of smalltimes http://www.smalltimes.com


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