LensGen | Ramgopal Rao, CEO

(Transcription)

Ramgopal Rao  0:03  

Thank you. I'm Ram Rao, founder and CEO of Lens Chen.

Video playing  0:21  

See, this bad. Not really looks like it says.

Ramgopal Rao  0:39  

We hate reading glasses. That's the summary. And we like to get rid of them at certain age. And today there are no solutions that are effective and permanent. So what's the problem? Why does it happen. And basically, as we age human lens ages, there are two effects. One, the lens becomes very rigid. When we are young, it's very soft and pliable. And it automatically focuses by changing shape. As we get older, it becomes rigid, it cannot. And that's why we need reading classes. On top of that, also the lens clarity changes with age. And by the time we are around the 60s and 70s, as you see here, only about five to 10% of the light is going through. And that condition is called a cataract. And it's easy, we replaced the we take the lens out surgically and implant a polymer lens in its place. And we have a clarity. So cataract is resolved. On the other hand for the presbyopia, which is the hardening of the lens. We really don't have effective surgical solutions today. And so that's where we're going to talk about. So what's the marketing opportunity here? There are 36 point 1 million cataract surgeries are done in 2026 and 5.3 million US and the market size is 7.3 billion. But half of that market is on the premium lenses. premium lenses are the ones that in addition to resolving cataract, also resolve presbyopia and provide you vision from distance to near. And at any lens that we can implant in the eye with a simple cataract procedure that restores what you had at youthful vision is truly a holy grail of technology. So today, there are products in the marketplace that are called generally multifocal technology. And these basically divide the space on the lens surface into different zones. One zone, we'll look at the airborne zone, we'll look at distance, but they involve compromises, as you see on this picture here. You can get very clear vision, but you don't have the range full range from distance to the air. Or you can get glare on the halos as you see on the left hand side of the bottom image there. But you don't have the you would have the full range. So the compromises are limiting the growth of this market. But because most patients want both. If you're going to be spending approximately $10 million dollars out of your pocket to avail yourself of this technology, you really want both. And today it's not available. And so when we started the company, nine years ago, we set out to say, what is that patients need? What is that surgeons want? And what is that industry warns? Basically patients want both, as I said, and they don't want any compromises of the surgery. And the surgeons want same thing patients want and they want the same surgical procedure they're used to. And industry wants growth in this very profitable component of the IOL market, intraocular lens market. And they also want a unique IP and which is not available today. And Duveen. That's the name of our intraocular lens and we'll provide all those needs for the different segments of the market.So how does your technology work? And it's a basically two piece lens and the first lens resolves a cataract, as you can see, provides clarity. Second lens is the fluid lens. So it is more like a natural youthful lens and they fit together and combined. They provide a solution for a cataract and a solution for also for presbyopia And so, initially, the market we're going after is a cataract market because there are 5.3 million in cataracts in the US 36 in the worldwide. But the later on, we'll also go to the pre cataract market where patients don't have a cataract, but motivated to change their lens to get presbyopia resolved. And the way you will works is just like a natural lens in the eye. And once it's implanted in the eye, first, we implant the base lens, which is the dark blue part. And then we inside that we put the fluid lens and and that provides the flexibility, same thing we have, and so it works just like a natural lens. So that's why we call this design biomimetic. And this is entirely breakthrough technology because they know fluid lens in the market today, and the dusty innovation. So we've been implanting these lenses in human clinical trials over the last six years. And we have implanted more than 100 eyes. And we have excellent clinical outcomes. And all the patients who have been implanted in both eyes with this lens, don't need glasses, anytime even in a dim restaurant, you know, under some low light conditions, they really don't need glasses at all. And most of the patients are seeing well from distance to the ear. They can all read newspapers, and the really safe and stable outcomes over six years. This is my management team. Everybody in this team has an experience of taking products from all concept all the way to commercialization. And one of them my plan to release here in the audience right now. And and we have good technical people, good clinical people, and we can execute. Now talking about this second market other than the cataract, which is the pre cataract market, younger patients, and their market scope has basically analyzed that market. And that 415 million people would be possibly clients for this technology. And it's a platform technology, we can spring more products from this. And just to the summary of the our journey so far. And we started in 2012 2017 we raised 28 million series A and recently our product or application to FDA got approved for clinical trials in us and we expect to start the trials soon. And we have excellent IP portfolio. Andrew from Kenobi Morton is right here who is responsible for getting all those patents for us. And thank you, Andrew. And and what we are doing right now is we're raising $35 million in series B to initiate the Phase One of the clinical trial. And right after that in about 18 to 24 months we'll be raising another $50 million to complete this study and have a PMA approval. And we also going to be doing C mark studies and simultaneously with this. We have a C mark studies as well. Thank you