Young son’s loss of sight in one eye prompted Scottish engineer to invent a better way of examining retinas

As an industrial designer and engineer, Douglas Anderson had designed many ingenious products for other people. But when his five-year old son suffered a detached retina and lost his sight in one eye, Douglas decided to take the initiative and develop a better device for detecting early stage eye problems. With help from his colleagues, he designed and patented a scanning laser ophthalmoscope that enabled eye care practitioners to capture a digital ultra wide-field image of the retina in a single capture. The devices are now used at some 3,500 customer locations throughout North America and Europe and have performed over 15 million eye examinations – one of which helped save the sight in his son’s other eye.

Although Douglas Anderson’s son had had regular eye examinations, conventional examination techniques available in the early 1990s only allowed optometrists to view the central part of the retina, so problems around the periphery often went undetected. Equipment available in specialist eye clinics could provide a greater viewing angle, but only with the use of eye drops to dilate the pupil – a slow and unpleasant procedure, especially for young children.

Douglas Anderson came up with the idea of using an ellipsoidal mirror in such a way that its focal point would create a ‘virtual’ light source just in front of the patient’s pupil. He calculated that this would allow a reflected low-level laser beam to have a scanning range of approximately 82 per cent of the retina – a huge improvement on the 5-30% of conventional examination techniques.  

Patent information points the way

From his work as a design engineer, Douglas knew that patent databases could be a valuable source of information. With assistance from his patent attorneys, Edinburgh-based Murgitroyd & Company, he trawled through hundreds of patents from around the world to check whether his idea was already in use. It turned out that he wasn’t the first to have considered using an ellipsoidal mirror, but he was the first to try to patent its use in an ophthalmoscope. Surprisingly and unusually, his search came up with one patent application that actually made the assertion that using an ellipsoidal mirror for scanning the retina would not work because of image distortion. Undeterred, Douglas found ways of using advanced electronics to correct the distortion and filed his own patent application for a ‘scanning ophthalmoscope for scanning the retina of the eye’. Unlike previous devices, the Optos ophthalmoscope would be capable of producing ‘high-resolution true colour images in a single scan’, without the need for eye drops to dilate the pupil.

According to Craig Hutchinson, a patent attorney at Murgitroyd, Douglas Anderson’s was a ground-breaking patent. “The ability to scan 82% of the back of the eye changed the way ophthalmic specialists thought about eye disease,” he explains. “For the first time, it was realised that it was possible to detect early signs of many eye common conditions by looking at the periphery of the retina.” The initial patent was granted in 1999 and Optos has filed several other applications to patent enhancements to the original technology.  Murgitroyd’s patent attorneys also continue to monitor international patenting and have helped Optos to buy the rights to a suite of patents for new technology in the field of adaptive optics, developed at the University of Rochester (USA). “Acquiring rights to technology already available somewhere else can often shorten the development process and be a lower-cost way of bringing a new product to the market,” says Craig Hutchison, who worked as a university postgraduate research scientist in electrical and electronic engineering, before qualifying as a patent attorney.

Strong IP helps raise funds

Designing a better ophthalmoscope was challenging enough and getting it into production and marketing it was no less so. “I realised quite early on that we’d need outside investors,” says Douglas Anderson.  “We set up a dedicated company – Optos – and put all the patents and trade marks into it. Patent protection formed an important part of the investment proposition.”

Investments from several local business angels saw the company through the early stages. Getting the product from concept to full production involved building prototypes and finding high-quality, reliable suppliers.  Some of these were available locally in Scotland but they also had to search further afield. Today, Optos double sources all components from suppliers around the world.

Optos devised an innovative business model whereby the company retains ownership of the device and eye care practitioners pay a fee to Optos for each eye examination performed. Optos benefits from recurring revenue and the practitioner benefits from having no capital outlay.

“Having a strong recurring revenue model provides greater visibility and financial reliability,” says Douglas Anderson. “This was also a strong component in our investment proposition when we went public on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange in February 2006, where we raised £50m to fund our continued growth.”

As a result of company’s continued investment in R&D, Optos now offers three retinal imaging devices aimed at different parts of the eye and healthcare market. The P200 is used for wellness screening carried out by optometrists and ophthalmologists, the P200C is aimed at advanced clinical optometry and ophthalmology while the P200MA supports doctors through an advanced medical angiography procedure. All three devices give practitioners the benefit of an ultra wide-field, high resolution view of the retina. This allows early detection, management and treatment of disorders and diseases detectable in the retina such as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration. Retinal imaging can also indicate non-eye or systemic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and certain cancers.

Awards and rewards
The company’s achievement in developing, manufacturing and marketing its retinal imaging devices was recognised in May 2008 by the European Commission and the European Patent Office (EPO) when Douglas Anderson went to Ljubljana, Slovenia, to collect the award for European Inventor of the Year  in the SME and Research category. 
More rewarding personally for Douglas Anderson was the role his invention played in saving the sight in his son’s other eye. “Fifteen years after he lost his sight in one eye, the Optos P200 detected the early stages of a retinal detachment in Leif’s other eye.  This time, the hospital ophthalmologists were able to treat it and save him from going blind,” Douglas explains. The role his father’s invention has played in saving his sight might also have something to do with Leif’s choice of career:  he is now working as an engineer for a Scottish firm involved in medical electronics.

Written by Peter Prowse for the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys.

For more information, contact:

Peter Prowse, CIPA:  01372 271234

Institute manager: Nicholas Pope, tel: 020 7405 9450

Douglas Anderson, Optos Tel: 01383 843 300

Craig Hutchison, Murgitroyd   Tel: 0141 307 8400, craig.hutchison@murgitroyd.com