Enrique Vega, Azalea Vision - Smart Vision Solutions | LSI Europe '24

Enrique Vega 00:03
So let me talk about one of the diseases which is really unknown but is affecting millions of patients around the world. It is called irregular cornea. What you see here is actually the surface of the cornea is completely deformed. This may be due to natural causes; sometimes it is trauma, and others also. You might have heard about keratoconus, and what happens when you have this kind of cornea is that the rays enter your eye in a completely different path than what they should be. So you don't have one image; you have several images in your retina, creating actually this kind of views of vision for the patients. They have glare, they have halos, and actually, some of them are even declared legally blind.

What we are developing as a technology is actually a smart contact lens with nanotechnology inside of it. This thin layer of electronics, which is actually a third of a human hair, includes a radio frequency antenna and ASIC, which is the brain. We have a battery, and in the middle, for the first application, we have these rings that we can customize. I will show you how we help the patients with this technology. We are also developing a charger because, of course, the device needs to be charged every night as it's cleaned. We can also use this charger to program the device and customize it for the patient.

So what we have, actually, from a patient point of view, is a dynamic pinhole that we can adapt for every patient. We can customize these in a fixed way, in an autonomous way. We can link to the light of the ambience because we have sensors in the contact lens that detect the light. We can also let the patient decide how they are going to use it because it's not the same thing if they want to read, drive, or walk in the park. By selecting the rays that enter into the eye, you can focus on only one point and clarify the image for the patient.

How are these patients treated today? Actually, these patients can use, let's call it classic contact lenses. There are different brands and different segmentations, but these devices are not bringing the patient to what we call 20/20 vision. Actually, these devices can move the patient from the left, which is with no correction, to the middle, which is with these fantastic scleral contact lenses available today in the market. But as you can see, even though there is a clear increase in visual acuity, they are not reaching 20/20. If you add our device, you can gain two or three lines of vision and reach levels of 20/20, which is what we all aim for when we go to the ophthalmologist.

There is a clear go-to-market strategy and commercialization strategy because these patients, of course, are not treated in the corner shop of the optician. They go to specific centers, very concentrated in the States; for example, there are 200, and each of these centers is managing 2,000 patients each. So you really have the focal point where you can see all these patients together. There are differences in the addressable market between Europe and the States, mainly due to reimbursement. In the States, these devices are actually in the market and reimbursed around $5,000, so it's already a nice market. In Europe, we are still behind in terms of reimbursement.

Where are we as a company? Actually, we are an IMEC spin-off that we created in 2001, and then we put in place the seed series with six million, and we developed the working prototypes. Now we are working on the Series A; we have a first closing already in place. We are aiming to get 10 million in total, and we are going to do the first closing at 7 million. So there are still three million that can be interesting for some of you listening today. With this series, what we will get is the results of a first-in-human trial, which will be the input to give to the FDA and get an idea approval that we will develop in Series B.

Now we are not going to stop at irregular cornea, which is a nice market, very easy to start with because there is a clear unmet need, and you don't need a lot of patients to develop. We will go beyond this because when you know how to put electronics and nanoelectronics inside a contact lens, you can do a lot of things. For example, we can focus on photophobia patients because we have a way to, let's say, control the light that the patients are using. We can also focus on presbyopia, which is the holy grail of ophthalmology today, because with a pinhole, we can create an extended depth of field, and we can eventually change and take out the rings and put in a drug delivery system, for example, for glaucoma, or we can also think about how to treat patients with diabetes by detecting what is in their glucose levels.

So there's a lot of applications that we will have in place. One that I wanted to show you is, first, how we treat presbyopia with this actual contact lens. As you start closing and creating the pinhole, you are extending the depth of field and clarifying the image. But we also have other pipeline applications that we will develop with a more sophisticated system. Here you can see a friendly lens with LCD created by IMEC in the same lab that we did the spin-off, and we are collaborating with them to include this kind of technology in our contact lens. The patient will be able to go out of focus and then decide that they are going to read, and the device will adapt, or they are going to look far away, and the device will adapt.

We are already working on the next generation. We have a fantastic team. In terms of employees, we are 11 employees, including my co-founder Andres, who is the inventor of the technology. These are the actual investors, the board members, and actual investors, and we have already a very big network of physicians, both in Europe and the United States, who are helping us to define the strategy and get in contact with the FDA.

So to sum up, we might become the first contact lens with an autonomous smart contact lens, meaning with an autonomous battery that you can move and live your life with. We might be the first one. We have solid IP already in place. We did the seed series for six million, and we are putting in place now this year, seven million for the first closing. We are aiming to get to 10 million, and of course, we are aiming to reach revenues of 150 million in year five after commercialization with the first application. Thank you very much. Applause.