LENS CRAFTERS

Visiogen Inc. founder and Chief Executive Reza Zadno got a flat “No” when he tried to convince three key engineers to join his startup.

The problem: Visiogen was based in the Bay area, a hotbed of cardiovascular, orthopedic and general surgical device companies.

Visiogen, though, is developing an eyecare product,a replacement lens for treating presbyopia, a condition that affects people over 40 and makes reading hard without glasses.

So a couple of years ago Zadno moved where the talent was: Orange County.

“I had no option other than bringing the company (to) Southern California,” he said.

Zadno said the company’s Irvine headquarters is closer to executives, technicians and consultants who work with the company.

Call OC the Detroit of the eyecare, or ophthalmic, world.

“It is a cottage industry without a doubt,” said Thomas Bender, chief executive of Cooper Cos., a Lake Forest-based maker of contact lenses with a market value of about $3 billion. “Today, you look at all the (ophthalmic) startups,most of them are all down here.”

Going back to the 1960s, OC has been home base to a thriving crop of businesses that develop devices or drugs to treat eyes.

The roster now includes Allergan Inc., IntraLase Corp., Ista Pharmaceuticals Inc., Refractec Inc. and Visiogen, all of Irvine, plus Santa Ana-based Advanced Medical Optics Inc., Cooper and several startups, including Aliso Viejo-based Eyeonics Inc.

Local device executives credit OC’s eye industry development to a couple of seminal companies and individuals.

“You have to give the credit to the Gavin Herbert Jrs. and the Bill Links, because not only did they create a company, they created a culture,” said James Mazzo, Advanced Medical’s chief executive who spent more than 20 years with Allergan. “I think they saw a tremendous opportunity in Orange County.”

Gavin Herbert Sr. founded Allergan in Los Angeles County around 1950 and was one of the driving forces with his son in the drug maker’s move to Santa Ana in the 1960s and to its current Irvine location in the early 1970s.

Allergan is OC’s second-most valuable company with a market value of more than $12 billion.

Link, a managing director at Versant Ventures’ Newport Beach office, has deep roots in the eye business,his previous career includes founding Chiron Vision, an ophthalmic surgery company sold to Rochester, N.Y.-based Bausch & Lomb Inc. in 1997.

Link also founded what became Advanced Medical as a division of American Hospital Supply Corp. The unit was sold in 1986 to Allergan, which then spun it off a few years ago.

Link “is probably the most instrumental venture guy in the ophthalmic medical device business in my mind,” Cooper’s Bender said. “He’s extremely bright and smart, understands the winners from the losers.”

“We built (Advanced Medical) for 10 years,it was the first surgical ophthalmic device company in Orange County, I believe,” Link said via a voice message. He then founded Chiron.

“That’s the root of the whole industry,those two companies,” Link said. “And now we have multiple additional ophthalmic surgical companies that have been founded by folks who were either at AMO or Chiron, so that’s part of the history.”

Although Allergan is primarily a drug maker, it’s produced a crop of executives,including Bender, Mazzo and J. Andy Corley, cofounder and chief executive of startup Eyeonics,who now run ophthalmic device companies.

“Mr. Herbert built a world-class pharmaceutical company here that focused on the eye,” Corley said. “That’s the genesis of the talent pool that was required to create this specialty focus in this area.”

Eyeonics makes replacement lenses for cataract patients.

Cooper’s Bender said the growth of the ophthalmic device side of the industry grew out of entrepreneurs who were here in the early 1980s with the growth of phacoemulsification and intraocular lenses.

“Allergan was always a pharmaceutical business,” Bender said. “It wasn’t until 1986 that they got into the device side, and they bought American Medical Optics. On the other hand, you’ve got many old Allergan executives running a lot of these device companies because they know ophthalmology.”

Daniel McWard, Visiogen’s vice president of marketing and business development, also cited Iolab Inc. as a key source company for the industry here.

Iolab was an ophthalmic unit of Johnson & Johnson that eventually was sold to Chiron,the device company started by Link and Corley.

Executives like to live in OC, McWard said. That’s kept people from moving away.

A couple of years ago the Food and Drug Administration moved its district office from Los Angeles to a building overlooking the San Joaquin Marsh in Irvine.

Venture capital firms that make healthcare and device-related investments such as Versant, Ventana Capital, Domain Associates LLC and Pacific Venture Group have opened offices in OC.

And the University of California, Irvine, also is acknowledged as a key factor in the area’s eye industry.

Three years ago, UC Irvine created a biomedical engineering department. Its advisory board includes representatives from Advanced Medical, Refractec and Eyeonics, along with other medical device companies such as Edwards Lifesciences Corp., the Irvine heart valve maker.

“A lot of medical device companies have a requirement for engineers,” Advanced Medical’s Mazzo said.

UCI also is under way with a $50 million fund-raising campaign to build an eye institute that is expected to foster research and treatment ties with local companies.

“We want to work with corporations, the medical profession, industry and the community,” said George Baerveldt, chairman of UCI’s ophthalmology department and a driving force behind the eye institute’s development, in an earlier interview.

Additionally, Mazzo said that Chapman University in Orange has contributed to the device industry through strong business and law schools.