Second Sight Medical Products Announces Year 4 NIH Funding of its Orion Study

Second Sight Medical Products announced that the company received notice from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the release of year 4 funding for its Early Feasibility Clinical Trial of a Visual Cortical Prosthesis (Orion Trial), grant 5UH3NS103442. The NIH released $1.1 million of the $6.4 million planned 5-year grant. The company uses the funds primarily to pay UCLA and Baylor College of Medicine to conduct the Orion Trial. The funding supports continuation of this research and testing of the Orion Visual Cortical Prosthesis.

The Orion Visual Cortical Prosthesis System is an implanted cortical stimulation device intended to provide useful artificial vision to individuals who are blind due to a wide range of causes, including glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, optic nerve injury or disease, and eye injury. Orion is intended to convert images captured by a miniature video camera mounted on glasses into a series of small electrical pulses. The device is designed to bypass diseased or injured eye anatomy and to transmit these electrical pulses wirelessly to an array of electrodes implanted on the surface of the brain’s visual cortex, where it is intended to provide the perception of patterns of light. An early feasibility study of the Orion is currently underway at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles and the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. No peer-reviewed data is available yet for the Orion system.