ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Ciliatech, the newest entrant to minimally invasive glaucoma surgery, has a device that by virtue of its placement, should avoid corneal endothelial cell loss, a complication that has caused at least one MIGS device to leave the market. With two years of patient data in hand, the device appears to be as safe and even more effective than Ciliatech originally anticipated.
Ciliatech SA hopes to occupy a differentiated position within the $4 billion market for surgical eye solutions. Addressing glaucoma and the 80 million patients worldwide suffering from this leading cause of irreversible blindness, the start-up has a new offering within the category of minimally invasive glaucoma surgery (MIGS), with two important advantages over existing devices.
First, the placement of the implant is designed to avoid a deleterious consequence of many glaucoma surgeries, and one regulatory bodies are looking at closely: endothelial cell loss (ECL) of the cornea. Second, the company’s Cilio-Scleral Inter-positioning Device, or CID, has the potential to treat not only the most common type of glaucoma in the Western world, open angle glaucoma, but also narrow angle glaucoma, which isn’t indicated for MIGS devices on the market. Narrow angle glaucoma (also known as primary angle closure glaucoma) only affects 20% of patients in Western countries, but in Asian countries such as China, its prevalence rises to 45-50% of glaucoma patients.
