Welcome to the online press kit for NovaVision, Inc.

There are approximately 8 million stroke survivors in the U.S., with 795,000 strokes a year, and approximately 1.5 million suffering some sort of traumatic brain injury (TBI) annually. Staggeringly, up to approximately 30% of these suffer a resultant visual impairment, up to 20% permanently.

Substantial numbers of Americans therefore suffer from a visual disability resulting from neurological brain damage. This disability has a dramatic effect on their daily lives, and can prevent them from working, driving, reading, shopping, crossing a road or staying home alone without help.

NovaVision's portfolio of therapies is specifically targeted to help these people, to both restore and compensate for this type of vision disability, which in the past has been largely unaddressed – in stark contrast to speech, physical and occupation rehabilitation which have been the standards of care. NovaVision’s therapies result in a meaningful positive impact on patients’ ability to go about their daily tasks.

* Vision Restoration Therapy (VRT) is the only clinically supported, FDA-cleared therapy available today to restore vision loss due to neurological damage. Decades of research and 20 clinical studies have shown that 70% of patients benefit from the therapy and increase their visual field.

* NeuroEyeCoach is a compensation technique designed to re-train patients to direct their gaze towards the affected area bringing previously undetected objects into sight. The therapy was developed by Josef Zihl, Ph.D., a world leader in the field of neuropsychology and a NovaVision Scientific Advisor, and is a computer-based eye movement treatment approach that has been the subject of several decades of research and numerous clinical studies. NeuroEyeCoach™ distills all the findings from this clinical research into one comprehensive therapeutic product.

When Vycor Medical acquired NovaVision in 2011, management and the company’s scientific advisors began discussing ways to further develop NovaVision therapies. Their goal was to broaden benefits to patients and make the therapies more cost effective, more affordable and widely available.

To broaden patient benefits NovaVision completed the development of NeuroEyeCoach™ in 2014. Normal eye movements are also affected after brain injury adding to the problems of blindness, so NovaVision decided to develop a further therapy to target these common issues. While VRT addresses the restoration of lost vision, NeuroEyeCoach is designed to address patients' difficulty with their eye movements and their ability to integrate visual information, enabling them to make the most of their remaining vision. These two therapies are therefore highly complementary, ensuring broad benefits to NovaVision's patients, and will be offered in a therapy suite.

To make these therapies more affordable and more broadly available, the therapy delivery is being migrated by the end of March 2015 from provided-hardware to internet-delivered onto patients' computers, significantly reducing cost. Further cost reduction is achieved through considerably streamlining NovaVision's business processes. This will make NovaVision's therapies affordable, with broader benefits and therefore both attractive and truly scalable and deliverable to the mass market. The price for patients will be $900 for VRT and NeuroEyeCoach in a therapy suite.

How it works

VRT is a therapy delivered over the internet onto a computer in the patient's home. Prescribed by a physician, it’s designed to both identify a patient’s visual field deficit and provide a customized therapy to help restore lost vision using light-based stimuli. While the patient focuses on a fixation point, a series of light stimuli are presented. These programmed light sequences stimulate the border zone between the “seeing” and “blind” visual fields, repetitively challenging the visual cortex with thousands of stimuli over the course of the therapy, usually six months. The therapy is patient-specific and modified on a monthly basis for each patient and is not to be confused with one-size-fits-all Apps.

NeuroEyeCoach is designed to enhance effective eye movements needed to carry out daily tasks, such as finding an object at home or on a supermarket shelf. NeuroEyeCoach re-trains the patient’s ability to scan the environment, re-integrate left and right vision and make the most of their remaining visual field. During a training session, the patient is asked to search a computer screen and decide if a particular item is present among distractor items. The level of difficulty is systematically altered by changing the target positions, number of distractors, and the similarity between the target and the distractors. NeuroEyeCoach is adaptive and adjusts the task difficulty to the patient’s deficits while encouraging eye movement efficiency. The therapy is Internet-delivered to a patient's home computer, both in a therapy suite with VRT for those patients suitable for VRT, as well as on its own for patients not suitable for VRT, and can be completed within two to four weeks. NovaVision also provides two Professional Models, one for physicians and one for clinics to provide the therapy to patients on an in- or out-patient basis.

NovaVision’s Scientific Advisory Board comprises some of the world’s top researchers and clinicians in neurology, neuropsychology and vision sciences. Members of the Scientific Advisory Board are available to discuss topics related to stroke and the science behind treating neurologically induced vision loss.

To learn more, visit www.NovaVision.com