Visiogen Raises $16.5M for Eye Lens Development
By VITA REED
Visiogen Inc., an Irvine-based eye device maker, has raised $16.5 million in venture capital financing.
The new funding brings Visiogen’s total raised to at least $21.3 million in its two years of existence, including a $4.8 million round last year.
Visiogen is developing Synchrony IOL, a foldable intraocular lens that is put into a patient’s eye during cataract surgery. The Synchrony IOL is designed for patients with presbyopia, a condition that affects many people age 45 or older and makes reading without glasses nearly impossible.
Prospect Venture Partners of Palo Alto led the funding. Existing Visiogen investors Three Arch Partners of Menlo Park and Sprout Group, the venture capital arm of Credit Suisse First Boston Corp., also took part.
Visiogen plans to use the new money to further Synchrony’s development, the company said in a release. “The strength of this financing insures our ability to bring breakthrough technology to clinical trials in the U.S.,” Reza Zadno, Visiogen’s chief executive, said.
Visiogen is about a year or so away from clinical work in the U.S., said Erica Rogers, Visiogen’s vice president of marketing. The company’s already launched safety and efficacy trials at three European sites.
Rogers declined to give specifics about how many workers Visiogen has or what round the new funding was, citing competitive concerns.
A report in the October edition of EyeWorld, a trade journal, cited an article in the British Journal of Ophthalmology where researchers found that replacing the eye’s crystalline lens with the Visiogen lens should restore accommodative function,the eye’s ability to focus,to patients with presbyopia.
Other companies that are involved in the intraocular lens market include two sizable players: Santa Ana’s Advanced Medical Optics Inc. and Alcon Laboratories Inc., a Nestle SA unit that has a large operation in Irvine.
Smaller companies that are developing intraocular lenses include Eyeonics Inc. of Aliso Viejo.
Visiogen’s Chief Executive Zadno has an extensive medical device background, including working as an entrepreneur in residence at Three Arch Partners. Before that, he was with PercuSurge Inc., a company that he cofounded in 1995 and served as vice president of research and development and chief technical officer of until 2000.
PercuSurge, which was bought by Medtronic Inc. in 2000, makes medical devices that contain and remove dislodged vascular emboli, or bloodstream particles, during surgery.
Prior to PercuSurge, Zadno was involved with Cardiac Pathways Corp., which produced mapping and ablation systems for treating arrhythmia, or irregular heartbeat. Boston Scientific Corp. bought Cardiac Pathways two years ago.
Visiogen also said it hired Dr. Luis Vargas as its full-time medical director. In a release, Zadno said that Vargas’ experience with accommodating IOLs, refractive surgery and ocular pathology at the Storm Eye Institute at the Medical University of South Carolina would “help drive Visiogen toward a successful U.S. trial.”
