Orange County is a clear leader in the race to cure fuzzy vision through implants in the eye.
The area is home to businesses that make intraocular lenses, which are implanted in the eye to replace the natural lens.
Intraocular lenses have been on the market since the 1980s but have gained investor and corporate attention in recent years because of several technical advances that cater to the aging baby boomer crowd.
They can be used to treat presbyopia, a condition where the eye loses its ability to focus close-up as it ages.
An estimated 70 million people aged 45 to 65 have the condition.
The lenses also can be used to treat cataracts, which some 3 million people get fixed by surgery every year.
Local intraocular lens makers are a mix of established players and venture-backed newcomers.
Bausch & Lomb Surgical in Aliso Viejo and Santa Ana-based Abbott Medical Optics Inc. lead the pack.
Alcon Inc., which has 750 workers in Irvine, does research and manufacturing here but develops and makes its intraocular lenses outside the county.
Startups include Visiogen Inc. and AcuFocus Inc., both of Irvine.
“The Orange County market is a very strong technology hub, so it’s attracting a lot of dollars, which obviously help fund the research behind these new and emerging technologies,” said George Neal, Abbott Medical’s division vice president for global cataract and refractive sales.
Big Companies
Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories’ $2.8 billion buy of Advanced Medical Optics Inc. earlier this year brought Abbott the Tecnis and ReZoom intraocular lens lines.
Rochester, N.Y.-based Bausch & Lomb Inc. also jumped into the field with its 2008 buy of Eyeonics Inc., the Aliso Viejo-based developer of the Crystalens.
When a company like Eyeonics is bought out by a large player like Bausch, “that just gives other small, venture-backed companies in the Southern California area a plan and a vision for where they ultimately want to go,” said Mike Judy, Bausch & Lomb Surgical’s vice president of global marketing who came to the company through the Eyeonics deal. “I’m sure that you’ll see other companies added to the portfolios of the major three players.”
Visiogen received a $40 million investment late last month led by the Novartis Venture Funds, the venture capital arm of Switzerland’s Novartis AG.
Novartis AG now owns 25% of Alcon and is poised to acquire the majority of that company in 2011.
The players in the crowded field are competing to improve the technology for the growing market.
“It continues to feed upon itself,each group challenges the existing technology in the marketplace, (and) you’ll continue to see further development here faster than anywhere else,” Neal said.
Bausch’s Crystalens now is the only Food and Drug Administration-approved entry in the accommodating intraocular lens segment, which is made up of lenses that work with the eye’s natural muscle.
But competition looms. Abbott Medical and Alcon have intraocular lenses that are pending regulatory approval within the next 18 months.
Visiogen expects Food and Drug Administration approval for its Synchrony lens in mid-2010, said Reza Zadno, Visiogen’s founder and chief executive.
Synchrony is an accommodating intraocular lens. Multifocal and accommodating intraocular lenses allow their users to see well at more than one distance without glasses or contacts. Monofocal lenses, another category, only correct cataracts.
Bausch also has introduced Akreos MICS, a traditional monofocal lens that’s designed to be implanted through a 1.8 millimeter incision in a patient’s eye.
Bausch also has another foothold in OC’s intraocular industry with its investment two years ago in AcuFocus, which is working on a replacement lens for presbyopia that’s now in clinical trials.
AcuFocus said its lens is different from what most others are developing because it corrects a spectrum of vision problems.
“For any of us who are over 45 or 50, we realize we need help in reading and seeing intermediate (distances),” said William Link, a Newport Beach-based managing director of Versant Venture Management LLC, a big investor in AcuFocus. “We liked the idea that we have implantation of a tiny inlay that would create a ‘pinhole effect’ and increase depth of focus.”
Versant led a $27 million round of funding for AcuFocus in 2005.
History
OC’s intraocular lens industry has a long history in the area, said Bausch’s Judy. In the 1990s, local companies including Iolab Inc. and Pharmacia AB pooled together a group of people with expertise in making and manufacturing intraocular lenses.
Iolab was an ophthalmic unit of Johnson & Johnson that was eventually sold to Chiron Vision, an eye device company started by Link and J. Andy Corley, Judy’s boss at Bausch & Lomb Surgical. Link sold Chiron to Bausch in 1997.
Pharmacia, after joining with Upjohn Co. in the mid-1990s, is now part of Pfizer Inc.
“When new companies are starting or new companies are looking to bring on different people, they typically look here into Orange County,and that’s where’s there’s a hotbed of experience here to draw from,” said Judy, who also is a former global intraocular lens director at Advanced Medical.
Edwards Names Link as Director
Irvine-based Edwards Lifesciences Corp. said last week it named William Link, a longtime local healthcare venture capital investor, to its board.
Link, who is 62, is a Newport Beach-based managing director and cofounder of Menlo Park’s Versant Venture Management LLC, a healthcare venture capital fund.
Edwards believes Link’s background “complements” its board, Chief Executive Michael Mussallem said in a statement.
The company makes heart valves and related products. Edwards is pursuing a new type of heart valve that doesn’t require major surgery. Its Sapien valve, which is inserted via a catheter, is seeing growing sales in Europe and is undergoing U.S. trials with clearance expected in 2011.
Link has been a constant in Orange County’s medical device industry, either through management, entrepreneurship or inventing, for more than 30 years.
He founded and served as chief executive and chairman of Chiron Vision, an eye surgery business that he sold to Bausch & Lomb Inc. in 1997 for $310 million.
Link also founded and served as president of American Medical Optics Inc., a company that eventually evolved into Santa Ana-based Advanced Medical Optics Inc., which was sold to Abbott Laboratories for $2.8 billion earlier this year.
Since 1998, Link has directed investments in some 20 companies, half of which are or were in OC. One of his biggest hits was IntraLase Corp., which was based in Irvine and made lasers to cut a flap in the cornea as the first step in refractive eye surgery.
IntraLase went public in 2004, raising $86 million. Advanced Medical paid $808 million for IntraLase in 2007.
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Vita Reed
