TearScience Secures $70 Million For One-Of-A-Kind Eye Device

Article preview from Start-Up - March, 2013

TearScience Inc. is ready to go into full-scale commercialization for a new device treatment for the most prevalent form of dry eye. In late February, the young company secured up to $70 million from HealthCare Royalty Partners to help make that happen.

TearScience Secures $70 Million For One-Of-A-Kind Eye Device

Article preview from Start-Up - March, 2013

TearScience Inc. isready to go into full-scale commercialization for a new device treatment for the most prevalent form of dry eye. In late February, the young company secured up to $70 million from HealthCare Royalty Partners to help make that happen.

TearScience was founded around a new mechanism discovered to be at the root of evaporative dry eye. While it was previously thought that dry eye resulted from insufficient tear production, company co-founder Donald R. Korb, OD, an optometrist from Boston, discovered that many dry eye patients suffer from inadequate lipid secretion due to blocked meibomian glands in the eyelid. Without this buffer of oil, tears evaporate rapidly, resulting in soreness, redness, foreign body sensation, inflammation, and all the other uncomfortable symptoms of dry eye syndrome. Of the 23 million people in the US with dry eye syndrome, recent research indicates that 86% is evaporative dry eye due to meibomian gland dysfunction.

TearScience, which was founded in 2005 by Korb and CEO Tim Willis, a medical device entrepreneur, has developed an entirely new way to diagnose and treat evaporative dry eye. The company offers a diagnostic device called LipiView, which measures the thickness of the tear film lipid layer to determine if the patient’s dry eye is caused by meibomian gland dysfunction. If that’s the case, the company’s LipiFlow can deliver pulsed heat and pressure to liquefy the lipids and unblock meibomian glands. “It’s a complete solution for dry eye,” says Nicole Wicker, CFO. With no predicate device (apart from warm compresses) on which to base its clinical studies, TearScience was the first ophthalmic company to enter the de novo 510(k) process, and it was granted its clearance in February 2012.

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