ONLINE EXCLUSIVE

Cataract
February 2023

by Ellen Stodola 
Editorial Co-Director

I had the honor of co-founding The Winning Pitch Challenge with retina specialists John Pollack, MD, and David Williams, MD, in 2017. Our dream was to spur innovation by assisting ophthalmologists with great ideas looking for advice on whether their concept was commercially viable and, if so, help them with the necessary steps to maximize their chance for success. We thought that if we could improve and facilitate the pace of innovation, we would ultimately improve patient care in our world at a faster rate. The Winning Pitch Challenge website was designed to achieve this goal by providing ophthalmologists with free access to key educational resources, highly experienced mentors with relevant business and innovation cycle knowledge, networking opportunities, and exposure to potential financial resources and guidance that could help them overcome critical early-stage obstacles, such as securing intellectual property, developing a working version of the product, identifying a team, and designing early-stage studies. Our hope is that ophthalmologists with great ideas will engage and submit their ideas and ultimately, if chosen, present their idea in a Shark Tank-type setting at the Eyecelerator@ASCRS and Eyecelerator@AAO meetings.

The next Winning Pitch Challenge will take place Thursday, May 4, in San Diego, California, at Eyecelerator@ASCRS 2023. This will be a great session to attend for those interested in the innovation process to either submit their idea and potentially present or just come learn about the process and hear the three finalists’ innovation journeys as they pitch to four judges in an energy-filled session co-moderated by my partner John Berdahl, MD. This year, for the first time, we have a fifth judge—the audience! It is an exciting program, and the past winners have felt it helped them to either found their company or take their small company to another level on the world innovation stage.  

—Vance Thompson, MD, Director of The Winning Pitch Challenge 

Jim Ellis, MD, won The Winning Pitch Challenge at the 2021 ASCRS Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, for the JelliSee accommodating IOL. Dr. Ellis spoke to EyeWorld about the progress made with the product since winning the competition.

Dr. Ellis said the company has since completed primate studies, which were promising and showed excellent accommodation on long-term follow-up. He added that the company has done its first in-human implants, with 1-month data that is encouraging. “We’re going to continue to monitor these patients and implant more patients in the spring, once we have longer-term follow-up on the initial patients,” he said.

The in-human trials began in October in El Salvador. It is a small, early proof-of-concept study that will ultimately involve 10 patients; five patients had been implanted at the time of this publication.

The goal of the JelliSee IOL is to have a monofocal IOL that fully accommodates, Dr. Ellis said, adding, “So far, that seems to be working exactly as designed.” The initial patients are seeing excellent at all distances, even reading 6 inches in front of their face. 

“We’re hoping that this is it, the true accommodating lens, but we need longer-term follow-up,” he said. “But if we look at the initial data, it’s promising that we’ve achieved that goal.”

The idea for this IOL started from an interest in optics. As a pediatric ophthalmologist, Dr. Ellis does not do adult cataract surgery, but when he was updating some teaching slides on optics, he was encouraged to learn more and study the physics of the pediatric lens. This was how he came up with a concept for the accommodating IOL. Prototypes were created, and bench testing was conducted.

After doing primate testing, the monkey was still accommodating well at 15 months out. “You have to do the analysis pharmacologically, but that was promising, and based on that, we proceeded to arrange for a small in-human study that’s mostly proof of concept. The plan is to further expand that study to a larger study.” 

Dr. Ellis hopes to begin a larger study later this year or early next year, with the goal of that being sufficient to get an IDE to allow an expanded human trial in the U.S. However, he noted that he is aware that the FDA process can take longer than expected.

JelliSee Ophthalmics is still a small company and has not yet gotten involved with any private equity or venture capital. “It’s all been friends and family so far,” Dr. Ellis said, though he noted that they have been meeting with a number of strategics. “We’re a unique company in that many companies form a large organization and set up to build and raise a lot of money through venture capital from the beginning,” he said. JelliSee Ophthalmics differs from this in that it’s a small operation without many permanent employees, using mainly consultants, which Dr. Ellis said allows it to use some of the best consultants in the world. “We had a product that solved a problem then formed a company,” he said. 

Dr. Ellis expects that sometime in the future, the company will have to expand as it becomes necessary to do large scale studies. But at this time, the company is working to continue to be efficient with its capital. 

So far, the company is happy with the product that has been made and the initial results. “The Winning Pitch Challenge was a great thing for JelliSee,” he said. “I appreciate ASCRS and The Winning Pitch Challenge. That certainly opened the doors with a lot of people who I’ve continued to work with since the competition. It validated what we were trying to do.”

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About the physician 

Jim Ellis, MD
President and CEO
JelliSee Ophthalmics 
Mclean, Virginia

Relevant disclosures

Ellis: JelliSee Ophthalmics 

Contact

Ellis: Jim@JelliSee.com