Date: Nov 02, 2011 Author: Bill Hethcock Source: bizjournals (
click here to go to the source)
If Encore Vision Inc. has its way, middle-aged men and women may soon be able to put away their reading glasses and bifocals for good.
The Fort Worth-based company is developing an eyedrop treatment for presbyopia — the lost ability to focus on nearby objects that most people experience around age 40 to 45.
The twice- or thrice-daily drops reduce lens stiffness and make the lens less viscous to restore flexibility, allowing the lens to thicken in the center during attempts to focus on objects nearby, said Bill Burns, Encore's president and CEO. The company's goal is to develop a treatment that will show measurable results within 30 days of beginning therapy.
"It's coming quite well," Burns said. "We've completed our discovery work and the discovery includes identification of a family of compounds that we can use to treat the condition."
The market is huge, he said.
"Virtually everyone on the planet develops presbyopia," Burns said. "Right now, 1.8 billion people (worldwide) have presbyopia" and about 100 million have the condition in the U.S. alone.
Many are willing to pay big bucks to ditch their glasses, he said. The average contact wearer shells out more than $500 a year, and about 2 percent of the vision correction market opts to spend about $1,000 per eye for Lasik and similar refractive procedures, he said.
Burns said it's too early to discuss how much the eye drops will sell for.
"Carving our way into the single-digit part of the vision correction market is a multibillion-dollar revenue opportunity alone," he said.
Product testing on animals has been completed and human trials are scheduled to begin in about 10 months. If all goes well in the testing and FDA approval process, the treatment could be commercially available in five years, Burns said.
One of the biggest challenges that lies ahead for the company will be securing funding to see the product through the regulatory approvals, Burns said.
Another will be working with the FDA to develop the regulatory pathway itself. Unlike drugs for conditions such as hypertension or high cholesterol, the type of studies necessary to test a drug for near-vision sight restoration have not yet been spelled out, Burns said. So far, talks about that topic with the FDA have been encouraging, he said.
On the funding front, discussions with potential investment partners have also progressed well. Burns declined to say how much outside investment the company is seeking, other than that it's a seven-figure number.
Dr. Robert McClain, associate vice president of Technology Transfer and Commercialization at the University of North Texas, works with Encore Vision through the university's product acceleration program.
"The opportunities are very rich for them," McClain said. "The problem they're addressing with their technology is a big opportunity. It represents an attractive commercialization path for the company."
Even so, Encore faces the same funding challenges most fledgling companies do, he said.
"It's a challenge to pursue funding and make it to the next milestone," McClain said. "That's always going to be a challenge whether we're in good economic times or bad. There's always going to be good ideas and innovations, and entrepreneurs have to compete to keep their ideas and their companies moving forward."
Encore Vision Inc. was founded in 2000 with financing from private investors. The firm is an affiliate of Encore Health LLC, which was founded by Dr. Jon Till, an ophthalmologist, and Dr. Ronald Blum, an optometrist, along with The Egg Factory LLC, a Virginia based company that develops and incubates ophthalmic technologies. Till and Blum filed a patent application for the eye drop near-vision restoration product in 2001 and the patent was issued in August 2005.
