WATERFALL RESEARCH PROJECT
Waterfall represents SIFI commitment to innovation applied to the therapeutic area of cataract.
The project aims at opening new trends of industrial research with a focus on biomaterials and adaptive optic studies thanks to the collaboration between the INAF and the LAMSUN, transferring technologies from basic research to finished products.
Waterfall will last 3 years and plans a 12 million Euro investment; it has been included in the section "Major strategic projects" by the Ministry of Education, University and Research - MIUR has contributed to its achievement with 8 million Euros in funding.
To this day there is no Italian company committed to the research, development and production of ophthalmic surgical medical devices such as intraocular lenses.
Our goals are interesting and ambitious in terms of development, given that we aim for international expansion in the main markets and a significant presence in the field of ophthalmic surgery.
Project goals
In detail Waterfall project wants to reach 3 main concrete results:
- accurate diagnosis of patients’ individual needs in terms of anatomical, physiological and functional characteristics of the ocular area through a series of highly innovative diagnostic devices;
- creation of customized intraocular lenses able to reproduce the individual physical and functional characteristics of the ocular district;
- improvement of short term compliance, producing intraocular lenses also for the therapy and the prevention of inflammatory infectious processes associated with cataract surgery; in fact, the drug delivery system of the material will make it possible to reduce the risk of infections and endophthalmitis (indeed infections can represent a post operative cataract complication which can cause the loss of eye functionality in severe cases).
The results of Waterfall project will arrive within the next 3 years one after the other.
To this day, the project has led to a first concrete result such as the creation of a new generation of MIRA® intraocular lenses.