吳怡璁博士接受美國蒙大拿的報紙”Daily Interlake”的訪問，有關於消像差眼鏡的設計、開發，以及未來在亞洲地區的發展潛力。
訪問內容如下：
The Asian market offers enormous potential for WaveSource Inc., and now the Kalispell-based optometry technology company has a solid advocate in the region.
Richard Wu, an optometric physician in Taiwan, has tested eyeglasses based on WaveSource aberrometer measurements — which can provide a nearly perfect prescription of contact lenses or eyeglasses — on about 200 patients. After great success with the trials, he has invested $600,000 into the business and is working with the company to develop the Asian market.
“I tested this on people who have had a hard time adapting to progressive lenses,” Wu said in Kalispell this week. “The feedback has been quite positive. All the wearers reported that the lenses have been very easy to adapt to. The lenses are measured to fit individual eyes, so they provide better vision and more comfort.”
Wu said traditional multifocal lens prescriptions, designed from eye tests using only a few basic parameters, sometimes don’t work well, creating a general sense of dizziness or depth-of-vision problems for wearers on staircases.
And in places such as China, a good percentage of the population is affected, since 90 percent of those younger than age 25 require vision correction (including 95 percent of high school age girls) as well as most people over ‘40.
Wu is completing all the necessary license requirements so that the Wave Source system can be ready for sales and distribution in China within a short time. The goal for the next six months is to place WaveSource aberrometers in the six major teaching hospitals in China.
The involvement of Wu is a good lesson in the importance of creating a network of business contacts, according to Joe Thomas, president of WaveSource.
“One of our most valuable assets is the intellectual properties that Steve retains with his contacts around the world,” he said.
Company founder Steve Dunn has been in the optometry community for decades and has forged relationships throughout the world. Wu met Thomas and Dunn 18 months ago after hearing about WaveSource through a mutual friend. He sent them an email after finding out more about the company from its website.
After receiving Wu’s letter of interest, “I looked at Steve and said, ‘We need to get on a plane,’” Thomas said. So they went to Taiwan and the relationship has grown since.
“It’s a small world in the optometry community,” Wu said. “One of the things that solidified our relationship was that Steve spent quite a bit of time in Asia, especially Taiwan. We have a lot of mutual friends and were able to develop rapport in a short time.”
Wu’s investment is the second recent piece of good financial news for WaveSource, which was founded by Dunn in 2004 to develop nonsurgical optimization applications.
In July, WaveSource was given its second grant from the Montana Board of Research and Commercialization Technology, this one for $110,000, to complete clinical trials of its contact lenses. Trials are being conducted in cities throughout the United States, including Honolulu, Pensacola, San Diego, San Francisco and Billings.
Part of the grant money is also being used to pay Flathead Valley Community College to provide automation for sending computer analysis of the eye straight to the lathe for the creation of contact lenses or eyeglasses.
A few years ago, WaveForm received $800,000 in private equity funding for research and development, as well as more than $87,000 from the Montana Board of Research and Commercialization Technology to develop the final technology to manufacture wavefront guided multifocal custom lenses.
留言列表
