From the beginning of the company, we had a hypothesis that the time was right to bring to market a breakthrough visual prosthesis, though we didn’t necessarily have conviction on the specific approach that would win out. Over the last three years we’ve worked on a wide range of projects, including notably the Science Eye thin film-optogenetic gene therapy combination device, as well as more recently the PRIMA retinal implant.
It’s clear now that the PRIMA implant is by far the biggest advancement in this field in decades, and also has a much faster path to market — and a scalable number of patients — compared to a gene therapy. We firmly believe in this technology and the work that Pixium Vision, Prof. Daniel Palanker at Stanford, and all of our clinical partners with the PRIMAvera study have done to bring it to this exciting point. We’ll have more exciting news to share about our PRIMAvera pivotal clinical trial, which is currently ongoing across five countries in Europe, soon.
We’re going to defer proceeding with dosing a first-in-human study for the Science Eye gene therapy until after PRIMA is on the market somewhere in the world. In the long run, these are likely to be highly complementary technologies: PRIMA works great in the small area of high-resolution central vision, the fovea, but isn’t a solution for the much larger, curved surfaces of the peripheral retina. It’s possible that in the future very late stage patients could receive both, working synergistically and activated by a single pair of wearable glasses.
In the meantime, we’ll have more news to share on the Lightsheet thin-film microLED technology soon, which continues to find more uses across a range of applications in conjunction with our Nixel and Pixel chips.
To learn more about any of these topics, here are some ways to get in touch or learn more:
- Retinal disease patients or families can find more under Science For Patients
- Ophthalmologists interested in more information about our PRIMAvera clinical trial or upcoming study opportunities
- Researchers interested in leveraging our chips and/or probe technologies for your research can find more information on how we collaborate
