Video Transcription
Burton Tripathi 00:00
Music. My name is Burton Tripathi, as she said, and I am the CEO of Beyeonics Vision. I'm going to tell you two stories today. They're going to be interwoven a bit. One of them is your story. This is a journey that you're on. It's your personal story, and you are going blind. That's true. The second story is about Beyeonics Vision. It's a commercial stage ophthalmology company that does visualization for ophthalmic surgeries in the operating room. Now I said you're going blind. I'm not kidding. You will develop cataracts. We all do. We get cataracts around age 70, some people younger, some people a little older, and our ancestors all went blind from cataract surgery. In fact, it was the very first surgical procedure invented. They poke you with a stick and try and get that lump of coal out of your eye so that you could continue to see. Didn't work very well, but they did it. Nowadays, we have modern medicine, right? So we're not going to actually go blind. I'm happy to say we are going to have treatment by an ophthalmologist, it's a very fast procedure. You do really well on the other side of it, and it's thanks to all of these many companies and many entrepreneurs that we have technology like this, modern med tech that allows us to see and retain our vision as we get a little older. So with that being said, along comes Beyeonics Vision. And our goal is to take what has been done previously and change it. We are about 45 people. We're headquartered in Israel. We have a commercial organization in the United States, myself and in California, and a handful of folks in Oregon and a few other places in the US. We're FDA approved and CE marked. We've done about 4000 cases, and we have five systems sold so far. So it's early days of emerging revenue. Those 4000 cases were performed the old way. What does the old way mean? Well, it means that a doctor is either on a headset or up at eyepieces, and they're shining about 100 watts of xenon energy, or an equivalent LED into your eye. And that 100 watts of light is toxic to your retina in the same way that we all wore those special glasses to look at the eclipse. You don't want to be looking at that microscope light any more than you want to be looking at the bare sun or the sun with your bare eyes.
Burton Tripathi 02:14
So what's changed? What's new? How are we going to transform ophthalmology? This comes back to your story. We might not all have knee surgery, we might not all have heart surgery. There's
Burton Tripathi 02:26
a lot of cool technology that helps with those, but we all, if we live long enough, we'll have ophthalmic surgery. We'll have cataract surgery. And I don't know about you, but when I go in for cataract surgery, the last thing I want to do is stare at that bright light for 10 minutes and lose my ability to see for the next few days. So at Beyeonics Vision, we've created a solution to this problem. We have introduced invisible light. What is invisible light? Invisible light is a doctor who's working in the dark. It's infrared illumination that's transparent to the eye. You can't see it. And this is Dr. Rob Weinstock. I think this will work. It's a little okay. There we go, a little staccato, but it's working. So he did his first cases on August 20. This is just four weeks old. It's brand new in the marketplace. It is FDA cleared and again, CE marked, MDR. Dr. Weinstock is using the headset. He has head gesture control so he can look where he needs to. He can manipulate the user interface, he can turn on recording and change the light level, zoom and focus all that stuff, just with a twist of his neck. That's all cool technology. And we do more than that. We have AI and recording and streaming and teaching tools and all of the sophisticated electronics that digital technology brings to bear. But for that patient on the table, it's a completely transformative experience. She—I can't remember if this was her second eye, but let's assume it was—she, or anyone of us, would have gone into the surgery and had the procedure done by staring into that bright light. The doctor would have sent her home because that light bleaches the eye so much that if he had done both eyes, a bilateral procedure the way that they do LASIK, she would have been in danger of tripping or falling or having difficulty making dinner or any of the other things in her life by having one eye that's bleached out and one eye works, and then she recovers after a couple of days. She can come back in two weeks and have that procedure all over again on the other eye. So in this case, we took this patient—the nursing staff did—rolled her out of the operating room into the ready room, gave her a juice box and let her get her bearings again, then sat her up, walked her into the exam room and had her read an eye chart. Normally after cataract surgery, within an hour of cataract surgery, you're lucky if you see 20/100 or 20/80; most people are more like 20/150 or 20/200. You can barely see when you get out of the surgical, or she was 20/30. We've collected 10 more patients' worth of data. And for eyes that are healthy, we're seeing 20/25, 20/30, 20/40—completely reasonable visual acuity without the need for visual recovery and the time that it takes to heal. So this is what's really changing the game. Now, I think you probably have heard me talk enough about this that you understand what invisible light brings from a value proposition standpoint, but I'm going to run through them just so I make sure I earn my living today. Number one, the doctor can see better. So for the first time, the tissue definition, the ability to penetrate really dense cataracts, really tough cataracts, the infrared has terrific tissue penetration capabilities and properties, and it gives them the way this ability to see things they couldn't see before. In super dense cataracts, grade four and grade five, today's standard of care is to use a blue dye to stain the capsule and then use that blue stain to tear the hole and get in and take the cataract down. That's $100 per procedure, and it's anywhere from 2% to 5% of a typical practice. With the infrared, not only can you not see the blue dye, but you don't care because you didn't need the blue dye in the first place. You want the light to go through the lens. It's retro-illuminated by bouncing off of the retina, and then you see as if it were a dark field microscope. You see all the edges and the tissue detail in the way that a normal, more healthy grade two or grade three cataract is treated. The third is the patient comfort. I talked a little bit about this already; patients are going into cataract surgery, and most eye doctors are asking them to write a pretty big check, $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $1,000, $5,000, or even $6,000 to pay for premium outcomes, which means they get rid of their glasses, and they can read the newspaper, they can drive their car, and they can play golf and not have to wear glasses for any of that. In order to ensure the best possible outcomes for those premium cases, the infrared really is an enabler for them as well. And then the fourth one is my favorite. And the reason why I'm so excited about this business, and why I think we have this massive opportunity to really save global payers tens of billions of dollars, is the bilateral situation. So I mentioned it earlier. I don't know—show of hands—who wants to go to the operating room twice when you're 70 years old and have an IV put in both times, right? I'm good with one IV, thank you. And I'm not a Valium addict, but if I was, maybe the two would be okay because I don't want to get it again. But for most people, we don't want to get it again. So let's have just one visit to the operating room. Let's have one trip to anesthesia, one check-in, one post-operative visit. Let's save Medicare $1,000 visit from the second eye because the doctor can do both cases in one shot. That translates to $2 billion a year in Medicare savings, and on a global basis, where there's 50 million cataract surgeries done this year in 2024, if you save $500, that's $25 billion—it's a massive, massive opportunity. It looks like I'm over, so I'll go fast. We got a nice revenue curve. We're going to exit. We're raising a Series C; come talk to me, and this is the summary. Thank you very much. Enjoy your journey into cataract surgery, and hopefully, you'll have a Beyeonics microscope there when you arrive.
