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April 9, 2020

$5M NASA grant to send LambaVision back into orbit

Photo | HBJ File Nicole Wagner, chief executive of UConn spinoff company, LambdaVision.
By Matt Pilon

The manufacturing industry can be challenging enough here on Earth, but a Farmington company is headed into orbit to test whether its product, an artificial retina, can be made more efficiently under weightless conditions.

LambdaVision said Wednesday that NASA has awarded it $5 million to continue development of its protein-based artificial retina, which aims to restore meaningful vision to patients who are blind or partially blind due to conditions called advanced retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration.

LambdaVision, which has raised $8 million to date, is working with a Kentucky-based company called Space Tango to research how building the retina in a microgravity environment could reduce the amount of materials needed, lower costs, and speed up production times.

Space Tango specializes in microgravity research, hoping it will eventually lead to improvements in biomedical and other products made 250 miles above Earth.

The newly announced money will pay for a series of flights to the International Space Station over a three-year period to study production processes and produce artificial retinas that will later be evaluated back on Earth, where LambdaVision still needs to complete pre-clinical studies before it can head into a clinical trial.

The artificial retinas are made using a “layer-by-layer” manufacturing process to ensure they are dense enough to absorb the right amounts of light. Weightlessness offers the potential to produce more homogenous and stable layers of protein film, the company told UConn Today in 2018.

The NASA funding will continue the research LambdaVision and Space Tango began that year, when the company’s materials first traveled to the ISS as part of a supply mission launch, UConn Today reported.

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