OptoTree LLC is a retina clinical disease diagnostic biomarker company. It has been formed to adapt the patented Vasculomics® medical vascular analytical technology/software platform, which is supported by over 45 issued and pending patents, to the early detection and quantified disease stage diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy (“DR”). DR causes damage to retina blood vessels of Type 1 or Type 2 Diabetes patients who had the disease for 5-10 years, is the most prevalent disease complication from diabetes and the leading cause of blindness in adult populations. OptoTree believes its Vasculomics® Platform is years ahead of others in this field and intends to capitalize on this leadership to capture a significant market position in the automatic retina disease diagnosis medical/ophthalmology field.
Technology
OptoTree’s Retina Vasculomics® platform technology is a working medical biomarker and informatics computer platform designed to detect and quantify unique 3D micro-vascular geometry/morphology patterns in organs that indicate disease presence and disease response to therapy. The underlying technology has been in commercial operation since 2010 providing oncology drug discovery services to large pharmaceuticals and biotechnology companies through analysis and quantification of the effects of discovery-stage oncology compounds on the 3D micro-vasculature structures of tumor angiogenesis and organs in small animals.
See our Technology page for more information about our technology.
Adapting the Vasculomics® Platform to OCT-A scanners
The Vasculomics® Platform was designed to process 3D datasets produced by a variety of 3D tomographic scanners and dataset file formats. As a result, we are well in the process of using the existing Vasculomics® platform to process 3D OCT-A scanner-based retina vascular datasets of patients at different stages of diabetic retinopathy. Furthermore, the analytical vascular metrics already developed and utilized to analyze tumor angiogenesis are directly applicable to analyze three dimensional OCT-A retina scans since, both cancer (tumor angiogenesis) and diabetic retinopathy-based angiogenesis exhibit similar neo-vascular growth behavior and responses to therapy. Both tumor angiogenesis and retina vessel angiogenesis are currently being treated with the same classes of anti-angiogenic VEGF inhibitors – Avastin, Lucentis, Tarceva, Eylea, etc.
Market
Approximately 415 million people worldwide have diabetes and this figure is projected to increase to 642 million by 2040. DR affects over 40% of people with diabetes and prevalence increases the longer one has diabetes. It is the leading cause of blindness for Americans aged 20 to 64. About 95% of cases having the potential for severe vision loss due to DR can be treated by appropriate and timely care. The key promise of OptoTree’s Retina Vasculomics® Platform solution will be to enable much earlier stage DR detection and treatment than currently possible (by human graders and current Fundus Camera-based screening solutions) with the potential of stopping or slowing the disease before lasting damage occurred.
The OptoTree Retina Vasculomics® Platform will open the possibility for Early Onset and Pre-Onset Precision Medicine in the Retina, able to support both, the diagnosis and the personalized therapeutics (DX/RX) combination.