WAVEFRONT STARTS CLINICAL TRIAL, PREPS FOR MARKET
Albuquerquebased WaveFront Dynamics Inc. raised $3 million during the pandemic, launched a clinical trial for its new eye-measurement machine, and moved into new offices in the Midtown industrial zone off I-25.
It’s now preparing for commercial launch in the fall for its medical device, which offers advanced eye measurements to customize sight correction for difficultto-treat patients.
“We want to demonstrate our first commercially available instruments at a trade show in November,” WaveFront founder and CEO Dan Neal told the Journal. “... Our prototype is working well, and we’re getting good results. We’re now preparing our first production run for 10 units.”
The company, which launched in 2019, is led by the same team that previously built an eye-measurement system to prepare patients for laser refraction surgery that is now used across the globe. Neal and his team built that previous system through a prior startup, WaveFront Sciences, which Neal launched in 1996.
That company was acquired in 2007 for $20 million, but changed ownership two times, ultimately landing at Johnson & Johnson. Even so, Neal and his team continued to perfect the LASIK measurement device until 2019, when Johnson & Johnson ended development efforts.
That paved the way for Neal and his team to pursue new markets by further developing the base technology into a measurement system for patients whose eyes can’t be treated with LASIK, or with standard contact lenses.
Now, rather than taking snapshot-like images of eyes as the LASIK device does, the new technology takes video-like images to record much more detail about an individual’s eyes to develop custom-made contact lenses.
WaveFront Dynamics, or WaveDyn, started out at the Bioscience Center in Uptown before moving in June 2020 to a 9,800-squarefoot facility at the Comanche Business Center in Midtown with laboratory and manufacturing space. The company also closed in May on a $3 million investment from local and out-of-state venture funds that it began raising last summer.
And it launched a clinical trial for its new machine in November in Albuquerque, with nearly two dozen patients now enrolled. It will compile intermediate trial results this summer in preparation for its fall commercial launch, although U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval is not required to go to market, Neal said.
The company won $114,000 in Job Training Incentive Program funding in June to help grow its workforce from 15 now to 21 by year-end.