HICKORY — A North Carolina-based medical software startup has landed a $1.5 million award to target eye disorders.
Hickory-based Translational Imaging Innovations (TII), which is developing analytics software to help scientists and doctors get medical innovations into the eye clinic faster, has received the Direct-to-Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award by the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
TII’s system consists of three parts: Lattice, a cloud-based software for clinical research workflow and data collection in both human and animal studies; Mosaic, an image-processing platform; and data from eye images.
TII said the award will allow it to fully integrate Lattice as a workflow-centric project and data management platform design for pre-clinical and clinical research.
“The vision science community deals with exceptionally large volumes of images and data in the search for better diagnostics and therapies,” said its CEO Eric Buckland, in a statement.
“The need for transparent data management and reproducible analysis is universal,” he added. “Our Integrated Translational Imaging platform is the solution that our innovators have been asking for to improve their quest for better patient outcomes.”
Lattice was licensed from its developer, the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Advanced Ocular Imaging Program. In the last two years Lattice has housed data from about 3,000 research patients and 80 research protocols. It will soon be deployed at Tier 1 research institutions in the Northeast, the West Coast and the British Isles.
Mosaic was developed by Robert Cooper, Ph.D., now assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Marquette University, when he was a doctoral student. It is in use at about six institutions including the Foundation Fighting Blindness, a Raleigh-based nonprofit organization that is the world’s largest private funder of retinal disease research. The Foundation is using the analytics tool to study Usher syndrome, an inherited eye disease.
When the system is further developed and integrated, TII’s first paying customers will be academic researchers who are either developing new analysis techniques to diagnose or predict disease progression, or using imaging systems to understand disease or treatment in small animals or in the clinic, Buckland said.
NC medical software startup targets eye disorders, plans to locate in RTP
