This transcript has been edited for clarity. 

Hello, my name is Sean Ianchulev, MD, MPH. I’m a professor of ophthalmology at New York Eye and Ear of Mount Sinai. I’m here at the ASCRS meeting this year, and I'm very honored to be selected to give the Kelman Innovation Lecture on Sunday at 10 AM. And I thought that one thing that would be great to do during that lecture is to share about my path from becoming an eye doctor to becoming an “i-doctor,” an innovation doctor, because innovation is so important today.

During the lecture, I plan to unveil several technologies, and 2 of them are going to be in the glaucoma space. A few years ago we introduced the first biointerventional technology in ophthalmology using biotissue, a 100% biologic stenting approach. And we were able to leverage that and develop it for unlocking the uveoscleral space.

And now we have a technology called Alloflo, used by hundreds of doctors in the most challenging cases of glaucoma that have failed prior MIGS or prior intervention, to open up the uveoscleral outflow. Because we know in the clinic, the first-line treatment in glaucoma is using pharmacologic enhancement of uveoscleral outflow, yet surgically we’ve never had that ability, and we only deal with trabecular outflow enhancement. So now with the Alloflo, we can do that.

More importantly, we now took that same allogeneic bioreinforcement approach, using 100% biologic tissue, no hardware, and we're able to do the same for the canal. And that's the technology we're going to unveil, called the Allospan. And the Allospan technology allows us to do circumferential canaloplasty with an implant, with a bioreinforcement. So that's permanent, durable, and creates a sustained enhancement of trabecular outflow.

Because ultimately, where we physicians want to go is not to be fragmented in our approach to care. We want to be able to expand and enhance the total outflow, both the trabecular and the uveoscleral, particularly in patients where that would be indicated, because they have much more moderate to severe disease.

In addition, my team at New York Eye and Ear has developed a very interesting technology called the miDOC (microinterventional dynamic outflow curve) that for the first time allows us to do biometric glaucoma surgery. Very similar to how cataract surgery advanced, we use IOL biometry to determine the appropriate refractive implant. In ophthalmology, almost every procedure we do is to enhance outflow, yet we’ve never been able to measure the outflow in the surgery. So when we enhance it, we don't know by how many percentage points we enhance it. So it’s time for glaucoma surgery to catch up to cataract, in terms of outcomes, where in cataract surgery, almost 95% or more of the outcomes are within 0.5 diopter error.

And so the miDOC will show how now, for 3 minutes, we can measure the outflow capacity of the eye before, during, and after intervention so that we can do a tailored, high-precision, high-fidelity outflow intervention, very similar to how we've done it in cataract surgery with IOL biometry and with the ORA device. So the miDOC will really talk about the outflow biometry and outflow biometry–guided glaucoma surgery.

So it’s very exciting times for innovation in glaucoma, and I look forward to seeing everybody at the lecture at 10 AM on Sunday. GP