Solx Inc.

Article preview from Start-Up - June, 2012

The gold standard for treating refractory glaucoma, trabeculectomy creates an artificial pathway to relieve intraocular pressure by forming an external bleb or blister under the eyelid so that aqueous humor fluid can drain from inside the eye to the bleb. Solx Inc. has developed an implantable device that improves on that method. The Solx Gold Shunt is a flat tube that detours fluid within the eye by using an existing pathway (the suprachoroidal space) that gradually shuts down as one ages. The shunt reconnects and reinvigorates this outflow pathway.

Solx Inc.

Article preview from Start-Up - June, 2012

Back in the 1980s, Douglas Adams was a sales rep for Humphrey Systems Instruments (now a division of Carl Zeiss AG), which makes diagnostic products for ophthalmology. While installing a visual field device in Pittsburgh, he encountered an elderly patient who had become blind from glaucoma. “This patient informed the doctor that her neighbor told her that going blind was a normal part of aging,” Adams recalls. “When the patient left, I asked the doctor how that could possibly be. He replied that we don’t have the right tools for advanced glaucoma. He also said that glaucoma is a surgical disease treated with pharmaceuticals.”

Adams never forgot those words. He told himself that if he was ever given an opportunity to start a glaucoma company, surgical intervention would be the focus because “the largest unmet need in glaucoma is refractory (end-stage) glaucoma, not the mild to moderate glaucoma that is treated with pharmaceuticals,” he says.

In 2000, Adams founded Solx Inc. Its flagship product, the Solx Gold Shunt,embodies technology that is the first major innovation for refractory glaucoma since filtering surgery trabeculectomy first came on the scene over 30 years ago, according to Adams. The permanent implantable device mimics the mechanism of action found in a popular category of glaucoma drugs called prostaglandin analogs, a multibillion dollar market.

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