Below is a very interesting article from the Globe and Mail.
The article was published on November
17, 3013 and addresses hope for the blind and Canadian innovation with vision-assisting
eyewear.
Ottawa
entrepreneur Kevin Rankin knows he has a hot product by the customers he has
seen since his computerized vision-assisting eyewear went on the market in
June. “They’ve been flying in from out of the country to see us,” he says.
“These are people who aren’t prepared to take ‘no’ for an answer.”
The answer
Mr. Rankin is offering is eSight, a wearable device that uses a video camera,
computer and LED screens to capture and process images in ways that can
dramatically increase the sight of those with uncorrectable central vision
loss. eSight’s early adopters are low-vision career people who need better
sight for their next job, students determined to lower the hurdles to their
education, and well-to-do seniors for whom the $9,750 price tag is not a
serious impediment.
eSight is
an all-Canadian entrant in an area that has scarcely been touched by the
technological revolutions of the past few decades, but that has recently seen a
surge of development.
Sub-retinal
microchip implants, an orienting device that reroutes visual information to the
tongue, and even a car for the blind are either newly available or in trial.
Vision technology may become a booming niche market within a few years, and
Canada could be a player, adding a new chapter to a hidden Canadian story of
frustrated innovation.
The
expertise is here, says Mr. Rankin, which is why the technology-rich Ottawa
area was a good place for eSight to be born. What isn’t clear yet is to what
extent private money is prepared to pitch in.
eSight
Corp. came out of the personal experience of founder Conrad Lewis, a telecom
executive whose family has been affected by Stargardt’s disease, a genetic
condition that can cause severe central-vision loss. Mr. Rankin says that when
he became company CEO three years ago, he was surprised by how little
technological innovation had been applied to the serious vision deficits that
afflict an estimated one million Canadians, according to the Canadian National
Institute for the Blind. Mr. Rankin was also dismayed by how hard it was to
stir up capital.
“People
tend to invest in things they’re already familiar with,” he says. “And the
funding environment in Canada is not as well developed as in other markets,
especially in venture capital.” In the end, he found sufficient private backing
and got the $10-million project to market, with help from the Ontario
government and the National Research Council, which drastically reoriented
itself last spring as an agency dedicated to marketable innovation.
Bogdan
Ciobanu, vice-president of the NRC’s Industrial Research Assistance Program,
says “a lot of angel investors don’t have the technical skills to assess a new
technology.” His agency’s R&D grants to 3,037 companies last year averaged
$90,000 per company, a small fraction of what most needed to move their ideas
toward commercialization, but NRC approval is worth a lot more in terms of
assuring investors that a project is technically sound, he says.
Not so
long ago, the NRC had difficulty seeing the commercial potential of projects
even in its own labs. James Swail, a blind researcher who worked at the NRC for
four decades, pioneered several advanced technologies for people with low or no
vision, including an ultrasonic object detector, tactile or audible thermometer
readouts, and voice synthesizers that anticipated those now used for
text-to-speech software – all before he retired in 1985 (he died in 2005). None
was ever commercialized by the NRC, though U.S. companies have since
rediscovered Mr. Swail’s innovations.
“He
actively manufactured the synthesizers in our basement,” says Mr. Swail’s son
Carl, who also had a career as an NRC researcher. “He probably made and sold a
few hundred of them.” But aside from a collapsible white cane he developed, Mr.
Swail Sr. was unable to get his innovations to a broad market, Carl says, in
spite of personal networking through the CNIB and among Ottawa’s financial
community.
When
governments started to wake up to the potential of high-tech industries, the
repurposing of the NRC began, culminating in the change last spring, which
eliminated what Mr. Ciobanu called “curiosity-driven research” in favour of
pursuits with “a very strong industry-partnership orientation.” eSight was
right in its bailiwick, and an NRC grant attracted private investors interested
in medical projects.
But that
pool of private capital, according to CNIB president John Rafferty, is
constrained by the low profile of sight impairment as an issue, relative to
AIDS or cancer. Society hasn’t quite figured out how to deal with the blind and
low-vision people, he says, and that has had an effect on industry and
financing. He’s well aware that the CNIB’s online store contains little that
wasn’t available 30 years ago.
“From a
research perspective in Canada, we underfund things that are vision related,”
Mr. Rafferty says. “But I think at some point, we will see a device that causes
a paradigm shift. I don’t know yet if eSight is the one to do it.”
Richard
Meadows, a Montreal venture capitalist and managing partner in the
biotech-oriented CTI Life Sciences Fund, says the shortage of funds for
vision-related projects isn’t due to societal attitudes toward the blind, but
to the lure of other, mostly pharmaceutical investments. If you take a stake in
drug research that pans out, he says, the rewards can be enormous and rapid.
“You don’t
have a huge blockbuster kind of effect with a medical appliance,” Mr. Meadows
says. But prime biotech opportunities are entering a cyclical lull, he says,
which could reverse the flow. “I see much more interest now in eye disorders,”
he says. Valeant, Canada’s largest drug company, seems to agree: It has bought
three opthalmological companies in the past two years, including Bausch + Lomb.
Another
problem for niche startups, Mr. Meadows says, is that many venture capital
funds have minimum investment levels, which can dilute the founders’ stake to a
degree they may find unacceptable. That’s especially likely when Canadians look
to the more robust U.S. financial community for capital – a good reason to keep
projects here, he says.
Mr. Rankin,
meanwhile, anticipates a steep price drop for technologies such as eSight over
the next two decades, as an aging population finds itself more in need of help
with severe vision loss. “We’re really at the start of a new era for people
with low vision,” he says.
