Siloton says an £8.4m Innovate UK contract takes one to two years off its retinal imager's time to market

The one-to-two-year saving is a forecast from the company. "The contract will reduce the time to market for the medical device by one to two years," said Alasdair Price, CEO of Siloton ^[10]. Physics World's report attributes the estimate to Price alone ^[10]. The contract itself runs two years ^[8].

Price also said what the money buys: "It will also allow us to grow the company, bringing in new skills around manufacturing and regulation, both of which are critical to the next stage of the business." ^[11] Those are the steps between a research-use-only product and a medical device. Price draws that line himself when he describes the planned hospital work: "These trials will be based around the prototype for the full medical device, providing additional post-processing and improved ergonomics compared to our research-use only product line," he said ^[9].

The evidence so far is mixed in kind. In 2024, using its Akepa chip, Siloton became the first commercial organization to show sub-surface images of a human retina ^[5]. The Project Ginan consortium in Australia bought a GiraffeOCT research system and evaluated its imaging performance independently, with healthy volunteers ^[7]. The Ginan evaluation is a useful outside check on image quality. With only healthy eyes, it cannot show whether the device finds disease. The patient imaging for age-related macular degeneration was run by the company itself ^[6], and the report does not include cohort sizes or a comparison with a hospital OCT scanner.

The home version is the harder claim. The contract covers it, with built-in automation and guidance so that users can reliably image themselves ^[4]. The trials named in the report, with Sunderland Specialist Eye Hospital, are of the in-clinic device ^[8]. We would expect the clinic device to reach the market first, since it has a hospital partner and a named prototype, but that is our inference. The only dated product in the report is the research-use CheetahOCT ^[12].

The chip also does not make the whole instrument small. Price said CheetahOCT "will also be much more compact, as we continue to miniaturize other parts of the system that fall outside the photonic chip" ^[13].