Rui Jing
Jiang

A Material Almost Too Thin to Believe

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The device Rui Jing Jiang is putting into human eyes is thinner than a strand of spider silk, smaller than a fingernail, and made of the same alumina used in high-performance ceramics - coated in a biocompatible polymer called Parylene-C. VisiPlate, the ophthalmic implant she has been building since her junior year at the University of Pennsylvania, is not a tweak on existing glaucoma surgery. It is a different kind of object entirely - a metamaterial that happens to be a medical device, manufactured at a university nanotechnology center, and now cleared by the FDA for a pivotal US clinical trial.

She graduated from Wharton cum laude in 2018. That same year, she won Penn's President's Innovation Prize - $100,000 in funding for a company she had co-founded the year before, in 2017, through a university competition called the Y-Prize. Her co-founders were Brandon Kao, a medical student she had met at a Penn summer program five years earlier, and Adarsh Battu, another Wharton student. The technology came from Penn's engineering faculty. The company - Avisi Technologies - came from a competition entry.

Before Avisi consumed her entirely, she spent time at Allergan doing corporate development, screening startups for acquisition candidates. At Sanofi Genzyme, she rotated through product roles. At JP Morgan, she worked as an equities analyst. She was doing the conventional post-Wharton tour - and watching, from the inside, how large pharma companies evaluate small medical device companies. She noticed the gap she wanted to fill from the other side.

What VisiPlate Actually Does

Glaucoma causes irreversible blindness by building excess pressure inside the eye. Existing surgical treatments implant drainage devices to relieve that pressure - but existing devices are thick enough to provoke scarring around the implant, which blocks the drainage channel and causes the device to fail over time. Revision surgery is common. Patient outcomes are uneven.

VisiPlate approaches the problem through geometry. Because it is less than 1% the thickness of a contact lens, the eye's immune system barely registers it. The multichannel architecture of the implant - dozens of microchannels carved at nanoscale precision - distributes fluid flow across a wide surface area rather than concentrating it at a single point. Less concentrated flow means less biological pressure on any one spot, which means less scarring, which means the device keeps working.

The implant is also placed in front of the eye rather than behind it, which cuts surgery time roughly in half compared to traditional approaches. That single anatomical choice has cascading implications for surgical complexity, recovery time, and accessibility in lower-resource clinical settings.

The manufacturing happens at the Singh Center for Nanotechnology at Penn - a research facility not ordinarily associated with commercial medical device production. Rui Jing keeps Avisi's engineering pipeline anchored to that academic infrastructure while running the regulatory and clinical operations like a startup. It is an unusual combination. It appears to be working.

From South Africa to the FDA

Avisi ran its first clinical trial - the VITA study - in South Africa, at three clinical centers, with 15 patients with open-angle glaucoma. The 12-month results, presented at the AAO Annual Meeting in November 2025, showed a 42.6% reduction in intraocular pressure from baseline, with 46.7% of patients medication-free at 12 months. No serious adverse events. No persistent vision loss.

The FDA reviewed those results and, in October 2025, granted Investigational Device Exemption approval for a US pivotal trial called SAPPHIRE. The first SAPPHIRE patient was implanted in December 2025. The trial targets 165 participants across multiple US sites, with a one-year follow-up period. MedVenture Partners led a $10.7M Series A in February 2026 to fund the work.

The Competitive Framing

The minimally-invasive glaucoma surgery (MIGS) market is not short on devices. iStent, Hydrus, OMNI, Kahook - there is a category. But most MIGS devices work by accessing Schlemm's canal, an existing drainage channel inside the eye. VisiPlate creates its own drainage pathway using an external route that places the implant in an anatomically different position. It is not competing in a lane so much as building a parallel road.

Rui Jing has articulated this positioning at the LSI USA Emerging Medtech Summits (2023, 2024, 2025), where she has become a regular presence. Her 2025 panel was titled "Staying Sexy Without GenAI or SaaS - Building Deceptively-Simple, but Brilliant Products." The title is a fair description of the product itself: a device that looks simple - a thin flat wafer with holes in it - and is extraordinarily difficult to make.

Where She Comes From

She grew up in Irvine, California, and worked part-time for the City of Irvine as a High School Youth Action Team Representative, organizing community service projects for teenagers. She went to Penn at 18, joined the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology, and met Brandon Kao at a summer program when both were still in high school. That meeting, in 2013, was the origin point for a partnership that would produce a clinical-stage medical device company a decade later.

The trajectory from Irvine teenager to FDA-approved device founder is one she has described with characteristic directness. On FDA interactions, she said in a 2022 interview: "Everyone thinks the FDA is really scary, but they're actually really awesome people." On patent licensing: "The biggest thing that they care about is royalties on future sales." She strips away the mythology and works with what's actually there. The FDA is a partner. The technology is the point. The capital is a tool.

The Scale of What She's Building Toward

Glaucoma affects an estimated 80 million people worldwide and is the leading cause of irreversible blindness. Rui Jing's stated goal is to make glaucoma treatment accessible worldwide - which means not just getting FDA approval in the US, but eventually building toward a device with a manufacturing cost and surgical complexity low enough to reach patients in settings where current treatments are unavailable or unaffordable.

VisiPlate's placement at the front of the eye, short surgery time, and minimal scarring profile are all features with implications beyond the US market. Whether Avisi's nanotechnology manufacturing can scale to meet global demand is a question that comes after the SAPPHIRE trial. But the design choices have already been made with that future in mind.

She has $25.3 million in total funding, a two-year head start on the FDA's pivotal trial clock, a 19-person team, and a device that does not look like anything else in its category. The SAPPHIRE trial is enrolling. The data will follow.