CED Member and CED Life Science Conference 2013 presenting company TearScience®, Inc., a privately held medical device company, today announced that it has secured up to $70 million in funding from HealthCare Royalty Partners to fully implement the company’s commercialization efforts and establish the TearScience® system as the “Standard of Care” for evaporative dry eye.
This news comes a month after TearScience® received FDA clearance for the LipiView® Ocular Surface Interferometer.
TearScience® is focused on the worldwide dry eye market with more than 100 million sufferers and 86 percent having evaporative dry eye.
“We are blessed to obtain this funding to build on our commercialization success. Our company had an exceptional first year product launch with TearScience® selling more than 100 systems and effectively treating thousands of dry eye sufferers and proving our commercial business model. HealthCare Royalty Partners’ funding and partnership will provide TearScience® the financial resources to build on our success and fully execute on our global commercialization efforts,” said Tim Willis, President & CEO of TearScience® in a statement.
“The TearScience® system revolutionizes the eye-care professional’s entire approach to evaporative dry eye,” commented Gregory B. Brown , M.D., founding managing director at HealthCare Royalty Partners.
“It assists the doctor in identifying evaporative dry eye, the most prevalent type of dry eye, and provides the most effective treatment. We believe this device-based solution delivers a more effective, less painful, and less expensive treatment option for this patient population.”
More than 23 million Americans suffer from dry eye disease. With the majority (86 percent) suffering from evaporative dry eye, this represents a more than $10 billion market potential in North America.
TearScience® has developed and launched its system to address this market. The system includes the LipiView® Ocular Surface Interferometer and the LipiFlow® Thermal Pulsation System. Evaporative dry eye occurs when Meibomian glands in the eyelids become obstructed and do not secrete the oily lipids needed to keep the water portion of tears from evaporating too quickly.
LipiView measures the absolute thickness of the lipid layer of a dry eye patient’s tear film while LipiFlow treats the root cause of evaporative dry eye disease by unblocking obstructed Meibomian glands during an in-office procedure.
The goal of treating evaporative dry eye by unblocking the Meibomian glands is to allow the glands to resume their natural production of lipids required for a healthy tear film and ocular surface.
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