Vivani Medical Announces $1 Million NIH Grant Funding to Support Cortigent’s Ongoing Orion Clinical Study

Vivani Medical, an emerging biopharmaceutical company that develops miniaturized, subdermal implants has announced that the Company received notice from the National Institutes of Health (“NIH”) of approval of the year 5 funding for the Early Feasibility Clinical Study of the Orion Visual Cortical Prosthesis being conducted by its newly formed subsidiary, Cortigent, Inc. This represents the final $1 million funding of the original $6.4 million five-year grant award.

Cortigent, Inc. was formed by Vivani Medical to continue the work of its Neuromodulation Division, formerly Second Sight Medical Products, Inc. Cortigent will use these funds to support the Orion clinical trial currently underway at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The Orion Visual Cortical Prosthesis is being developed with the goal of providing meaningful artificial vision to profoundly blind people. Based on a company-sponsored U.S. market study, the Company estimates that about 82,000 Americans are profoundly blind. The 5-year results for the Orion Early Feasibility Study are expected in mid-2023.

Leveraging Second Sight’s 20 years of experience in neurostimulation for vision, the Orion Visual Cortical Prosthesis System (Orion) is an implanted cortical stimulation device intended to provide useful artificial vision to individuals who are blind due to a wide range of causes, including glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, optic nerve injury or disease, and eye injury. Orion is intended to convert images captured by a miniature video camera mounted on glasses into a series of small electrical pulses. The device is designed to bypass diseased or injured eye anatomy and to transmit these electrical pulses wirelessly to an array of electrodes implanted on the surface of the brain’s visual cortex, where it is intended to provide the perception of patterns of light.