BOSTON— Adaptilens, Inc., a pre-clinical company dedicated to transforming the standard of care for cataract surgery, today announced the closing of a Series A financing round of $17.5 million led by Perceptive Xontogeny Venture Funds (PXV Funds), with additional investments from Pillar VC, 380 Cap, and Accanto Partners. The capital will drive the development of the company’s Accommodating Intraocular Lens (A-IOL), the first and only biomimetic intraocular lens, through first-in-human trials.
The Series A follows an earlier seed round of $1.6 million led by Pillar VC with participation from Accanto Partners and additional awards from the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge and the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center Initiative for Women Entrepreneurs.
Adaptilens’s mission is to revolutionize cataract surgery by restoring vision to its youthful state. The National Eye Institute expects the number of Americans with cataracts to double by 2050, from 24 million to approximately 50 million. Annually, more than 4 million Americans undergo cataract surgery. The current standard of care for cataract surgery entails replacement of the cataractous lens with a flat, monofocal lens that allows clear vision at either near or far distance, but not both. The Adaptilens A-IOL is a novel, flexible, artificial lens that imitates the human lens by responding to the eye’s natural signal to focus. Restoring clear near, intermediate, and distance vision — unaided by eyeglasses or contact lenses — will provide people with a significant quality of life-enhancing improvement to the current standard of care.
“The young, healthy, human eye is perfectly designed, and its soft, flexible lens is what allows the eye to change power for a full range of vision. Our goal is to provide the growing number of people who need cataract surgery with a biomimetic option that restores youthful vision. This funding is meaningful as it enables our exceptional team to accelerate the development of our best-in-class A-IOL,” commented Liane Clamen, MD, Adaptilens Founder and Chief Executive Officer. “We’re grateful to PXV Funds and our entire investor base for recognizing the transformative potential of Adaptilens.”
“We’re compelled by Adaptilens’s innovative and elegant technology, which lies in their novel A-IOL design and proprietary polymer materials,” said Gianna Hoffman-Luca, PhD, Senior Principal, Venture at Perceptive Advisors and Partner at Xontogeny. “Equally inspiring is the Adaptilens team of experts’ unwavering dedication to developing the best-in-class A-IOL, a game-changing solution for the burgeoning millions of people needing cataract surgery. We’re excited for Adaptilens to join our portfolio of companies and to support them in their next phase of growth from pre-clinical to clinical.”
