Phosphoenix, a startup that was co-founded by Xing Chen, PhD, Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology, has won a highly competitive €2.5M European Innovation Council (EIC) Transition grant via the Horizon Europe Programme, for a new project named “SIGHTED.” The neural prosthesis project will develop and commercialize a brain implant for vision restoration.
This year saw the highest number of proposals ever submitted. The company will build on the results from their “NeuraViPeR project,” which previously received funding via the Horizon 2020 Future and Emerging Technologies (FET-Open) programme, to validate and demonstrate their technology and develop business and market readiness.
Phosphoenix’s patent is called the Fountain Probe, an ultra-flexible, high-density implant capable of volumetric neural recording and stimulation in deep brain regions. “As a versatile platform technology, it holds potential for a wide range of brain-based therapies, including the restoration of vision, hearing, and motor function, neuromodulation therapies, and for novel research tools in conditions such as epilepsy,” the company’s flyer states.
The visual prosthesis system includes glasses equipped with a camera and eye-tracking capabilities to capture visual information, and a pocket processor. “The video footage is transformed into stimulation patterns, which are directly transferred to the brain, creating a functional form of vision,” according to Phosphoenix.
As for the implantation procedure, it is similar to deep brain stimulation implantations, which have been successfully carried out in more than 200,000 patients worldwide with low complication rates.
Phosphoenix is a spin-off from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN). It was founded in 2019 by Chen’s postdoctoral supervisor Pieter Roelfsema, one of their industry collaborators, Bert Monna, and Dr. Chen. “It is a MedTech startup with a mission to restore functional and life-enhancing vision to those who have lost, leveraging results from my neuroscientific research on visual perception and vision restoration for its innovative work,” said Dr. Chen.
To date, the startup has received several research grants and (pre)seed financing from MedTech investors and has successfully tested the prototype in pre-clinical animal models. The “goal is to translate the technology into a clinical product by carrying out early feasibility studies in blind patients in the coming years,” Dr. Chen said.