Eleven Biotherapeutics says it’s in line for $22.5 million from partner Roche after an experimental eye treatment that the companies have partnered on hit a key early milestone that puts it on the path to starting clinical trials.
Researchers have made a smart contact lens and eyeglass combination that could be used to monitor diabetes and dispense drugs on-demand. The system includes cool-looking eyeglasses that wirelessly power and communicate with the circuit-lined, drug-releasing lens that a patient could wear for up to a month.
If it works, it could mean an end to the multiple painful finger pricks diabetics endure every day to monitor blood glucose levels. And it would be an easy, efficient way to treat the blindness-causing eye diseases that are common complications of diabetes.
The round, led by leading healthcare provider InterMountain Healthcare, will be used to accelerate the development of Zebra’s imaging analytics engine and create neural networks that will use Zebra’s vast imaging dataset to assist radiologists with automated diagnostic algorithms.
Back in 1873, the German physicist Ernst Abbe discovered a fundamental limit in the performance of imaging systems such as microscopes or camera lenses. These systems simply cannot resolve features smaller than a critical size determined by the wavelength of light.
For visible light, this resolution limit is about 200 nanometers; anything smaller cannot be resolved. That includes viruses, features inside cells such as microtubules and DNA molecules, even the grooves on a standard Blu-ray DVD disc.
But in recent years, physicists have discovered a way around Abbe’s limit. Whenever light bounces off an object, it diffracts and interferes, causing any fine details to be lost. For visible light, this process takes place in the first few nanometers from the surface.
It’s been a common sight over the past few years for a biotech startup to bring a bunch of “crossover” investors—who invest in both public and private companies—into the mix before taking a crack at an IPO. Kala Pharmaceuticals just got the first part of that done by raising a $68 million Series C round this morning. Time will tell if that means a public stock offering is on the horizon.
Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Shiley Eye Institute, with colleagues in China, have developed a new, regenerative medicine approach to remove congenital cataracts in infants, permitting remaining stem cells to regrow functional lenses.
The treatment, which has been tested in animals and in a small, human clinical trial, produced much fewer surgical complications than the current standard-of-care and resulted in regenerated lenses with superior visual function in all 12 of the pediatric cataract patients who received the new surgery.
The findings are published in the March 9 online issue of Nature.
Científicos de la Facultad de Óptica y Optometría de Terrassa (FOOT) de la Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya (UPC) han presentado este lunes una innovadora lente de contacto que frena la progresión de la miopía en un 43 %.
La lente de contacto la ha desarrollado Jaume Pauné, doctorado recientemente en la UPC, que ha presentado el nuevo producto en una rueda de prensa celebrada hoy en el FOOT de la UPC.
La diferencia entre las lentes de contacto convencionales y la nueva es que las que se usan habitualmente corrigen solamente la visión central del ojo y no los laterales, lo que provoca el crecimiento del ojo y de la miopía, mientras que la lente de Pauné evita este aumento al cubrir también la visión lateral.
If all goes according to plan, sometime next month a surgeon in Texas will use a needle to inject viruses laden with DNA from light-sensitive algae into the eye of a legally blind person in a bet that it could let the patient see again, if only in blurry black-and-white.
