OculoMotor Technologies, a campus-based health care startup with a device that employs virtual reality gaming to correct a vision dysfunction – technology designed and developed by a professor and a team of students, now alumni, in a biomedical engineering lab at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) – has received a $500,000 commitment from Foundation Venture Capital Group, LLC, an affiliate of New Jersey Health Foundation (NJHF).
OculoMotor Technologies, which at an earlier stage in its development received two $50,000 innovation grants from NJHF to advance the device, is the first NJIT-originated company to secure equity capital from the organization’s related venture group.
“It would be easy for me to view NJHF’s investment as the culmination of years of hard work – but, in reality, it’s barely the first step on a long journey. Their investment serves as validation of all that we’ve already done, and enables the amazing opportunity for us to develop our prototype into a fully fledged commercially available product,” said NJIT alumnus John Vito d’Antonio-Bertagnolli ’16, M.S. ’17, one of the developers in Professor Tara Alvarez’s lab who is now OMT’s CEO.
The device is designed to measure and correct an eye motor disorder called convergence insufficiency (CI), in which a person’s eyes fail to coordinate as they turn inward to focus on a near object, such as the page of a book. Because each eye sees the image separately, the person experiences double and blurred vision and has difficulty concentrating.
With CI as a key biomarker for concussion, it is being tested in children’s hospitals across the country. The platform is a computer game played by the eyes, while a hidden camera measures their movements.
“This marks a milestone as our first investment in an NJIT-originated company and we are excited to work closely with the OMT team as they continue to advance their therapeutic product toward commercialization,” said George F. Heinrich, M.D., vice chair and CEO of NJHF.
