Ocumetics Technology Corporation could become, if not a household name, a lot more familiar to people in Canada, and around the world, particularly those with vision problems.
ListenCEO Dr. Garth Webb, a British Columbia optometrist, has spent a lot of time and money coming up with a surgically inserted lens that may provide better than 20/20 vision to many people.
‘I built this lens for my eyes and the moment this lens has gone through the appropriate, if you will, blind eye studies, I’m going to be one of the very first people to have this done.’
Dr. Webb says he followed his passion into the study of optometry because of his own experience being “cursed” with glasses and contacts, since he was in Grade 2.
In an interview with Camille Bains, of the Canadian Press, Dr. Webb revealed that as a boy ‘my heroes were cowboys, and cowboys just did not wear glasses.”
At the recent annual gathering of the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Sugery, Dr. Webb presented his lens to 14 of the top opthamologists.
‘Better than 20/20 vision’
Dr. Vincent DeLuise, an ophthalmologist who teaches at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, told Ms. Bains, he had arranged several meetings on April 17, when experts in various fields learned about the lens.
In the Canadian Press article he said, “There’s a lot of excitement about the Bionic Lens from very experienced surgeons who perhaps had some cynicism about this because they’ve seen things not work in the past. They think that this might actually work and they’re eager enough that they all wish to be on the medical advisory board to help him on his journey,” DeLuise says.
“I think this device is going to bring us closer to the holy grail of excellent vision at all ranges — distant, intermediate and near.”
Along with the Bionic Lens development, Dr. Webb established ‘Celebration of Sight’, a foundation to donate money to organizations working to provide eye surgery in developing countries. Dr. DeLuise has been asked to run the foundation.
Clinical trials are the next step, and pending the outcome on animals and blind human eyes the Bionic Lens may be available in Canada within the next two years.
‘we can make cameras have an efficacy that’s way beyond anything that’s ever (been) seen before’
The same lens technology Dr. Webb developed for the human eye is also available for digital cameras. He says, “we can make cameras have an efficacy that’s way beyond anything that’s ever seen before and we can do so using the same kind of formatting as what the eye has so that these two systems, the visual system of the human being can be replicated with the digital imaging system so that we can achieve a complete and utter transport of the complete human visual experience.”
The result according to Dr. Webb is, ” You will be immersed within images instead of just looking at little photographs.”
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