Meet the Company: Ocutec

Meet the company:

Oshan Bennett, Senior Marketing Executive at Deepbridge Capital, interviews Scott Carnegie, Chairman of Ocutec, which is part of the Deepbridge Technology Growth EIS portfolio.

Scott Carnegie, Chairman of Ocutec

Oshan Bennett: Scott, can you tell us a little bit about the background of founding Ocutec and where it came from?

Scott Carnegie: Ocutec has been around for a while and the company was founded back in 2001. The driving force behind the foundations of Ocutec was Professor Neil Graham. He was probably one of the world’s leading polymer chemists. Neil worked for AstraZeneca, and he specialised in PEG (Polyethylene Glycol), which is the foundation material in which Ocutec’s technology is built. Lots of people around the globe have tried to work with that product before, but it was Neil that found a way to stabilize PEG so that it had a long shelf life. That IP was protected originally by AstraZeneca and after Neil retired, he was in such high regard with AstraZeneca that they donated that IP to him.

Sadly, Neil passed away but at the point of him being donated the IP, he set up numerous companies, one of which was Ocutec. He pulled together a management team and a group of scientists to try and deliver his vision.

PEG is biomimetic material, which means you can put it inside your body, and it’ll do nothing. One of the biggest problems with contact lenses is when you put a piece of plastic in your eye, your eye usually rejects it – unless its biomimetic material which is one of the advantages PEG has over other forms of material. Other materials must be coated to stop people’s eyes rejecting it whilst PEG doesn’t. So, we can produce contact lenses that allows oxygen to pass through it and holds lots of water. Those are the two key elements that you need when producing contact lenses. Other major companies tried to make contact lenses using this material, but never managed to make it stable – which is where Neil Graham’s science came into fruition. That’s why we’re able to have that material which is patent protected and that’s where the beginning of the company came from.

OB: How long have you been involved in the company and how has the company evolved since then?

SC: In the early years, up until about 20052006, a lot of the scientists were in the lab working with PEG and they had to try and create something that could become a commercial product. I first joined the company in late 2006 as Chairman of an Angel group called Discovery Investment fund. We decided to invest into Ocutec, which was our first investment and because of that we put a non-executive on the board of the company and that was myself. My journey with Ocutec started at that point. Since then, we have gone Neil worked for AstraZeneca, and he specialized PEG (Polyethylene Glycol), which is the foundation material in which Ocutec’s technology is built. Lots of people around the globe have tried to work with that product before, but it was Neil that found a way to stabilize PEG so that it had a long shelf life.

Scott Carnegie, Chairman of Ocutec

through a couple of major changes, for example, around 2009 we got one of the major contact lenses on the board of the company who took a development license with us to try and create an injected moulded contact lens – which there are none in the world.

The advantage of injection moulding is cost of goods. When you create a contact lens now, there is a process called reaction cast moulding. Which means there is a male and female mould, and you press them together, there are numerous stages in that process, all of which add to the production cost. If you can inject the material into a metal mould, it means you don’t have to use plastic moulds and the production of the lenses ends up being much faster and cheaper too, with much less steps in the process.

That is the holy grail within the industry, reducing costs and we think that the material we use is perfect for that.

OB: What are your main hopes and objectives for the next 12 months?

SC: There is constant research and development going on because we are always looking for ways to improve things. We’re hiring several science staff as well to give us capacity to do even more in that area which I think is important going forward. The goals in the next 12 months are that we want to take the technology we have and get licensing and commercial income into the business. Thereafter, we’re looking at raising the money that will allow us to go into manufacturing at scale. Effectively, the main goals are to sell licenses of the technology and also improve the manufacturing process going forward. We can produce contact lenses that allows oxygen to pass through it and holds lots of water. Those are the two key elements that you need when producing contact lenses.

Scott Carnegie, Chairman of Ocutec