ophthalmology
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Henry Hsu Has Spent a Career Turning Small Molecules Into Big Decisions
The physician-founder behind Allysta learned biotech from the least glamorous end: protocols, partnerships and the long distance between a promising mechanism and a credible medicine.
Tim Willis Keeps Betting on the Space Between Blinks
He built TearScience from a treatment idea into a company acquired by Johnson & Johnson. Then the engineer returned to the same tiny surface with a new question: can an eye drop learn to stay put?
Amr Salahieh Built a Factory for Starting Companies
He kept losing time to leases, hiring and infrastructure. So the engineer behind Shifamed designed those distractions out - and turned one company-building career into a repeatable system.
Cheng Zhang
Cheng Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Character Biosciences, a precision-medicine biotech that flips traditional drug discovery on its head by starting with patients instead of targets. Trained in mathematics and philosophy at Duke and shaped by years at UBS, Oliver Wyman, and Pfizer, Zhang built Character around a proprietary database of thousands of patients with age-related macular degeneration, combining genomics, longitudinal clinical data, retinal imaging, and machine learning to reclassify common diseases of aging into genetic subtypes. In 2025 the company raised an oversubscribed $93 million Series B to move its lead eye-disease candidates into the clinic.
Rich Small
Rich Small is the CEO of Neurotech Pharmaceuticals, the Cumberland, Rhode Island clinical-stage biotech that in March 2025 won FDA approval for ENCELTO, the first and only treatment for macular telangiectasia type 2 (MacTel). A CPA and Northeastern University graduate, he joined Neurotech as CFO in 2007 and took over the top job in 2016, guiding the company's encapsulated cell technology platform from experimental science to a commercial retinal implant.
Tuyen Ong
Tuyen Ong is a physician-turned-biotech executive who spent four years as CEO of Ring Therapeutics, the Flagship Pioneering company trying to turn anelloviruses - harmless viruses that already live in nearly everyone - into a redosable delivery system for genetic medicines. Trained as an ophthalmologist at University College London with an MBA from NYU Stern, he built his career on gene therapy for rare eye disease at Nightstar, Biogen, PTC, Bausch & Lomb and Pfizer before betting on a virus most scientists had written off as biological junk. In 2025 he co-founded PharmasMarket, a drug-development consultancy.
Xuandai Nguyen
Xuandai Nguyen, Ph.D., MBA, is Vice President, Head of Global Program Strategy and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Beacon Therapeutics, an ophthalmic gene therapy company working to restore sight in people with inherited and prevalent retinal diseases. A scientist-turned-strategist, Nguyen has spent more than two decades moving medicines from bench to market, with senior roles at Genentech, Forma Therapeutics and ACELYRIN spanning immunology, ophthalmology, respiratory and sickle cell disease. Trilingual and Berkeley- and Cornell-trained, Nguyen sits at the intersection of hard science and commercial strategy, translating complicated biology into the plans that decide which therapies reach patients.
Samantha Scott
Samantha Scott, PhD is the founder and CEO of JuneBrain, a Baltimore medtech startup building the first wearable, technician-free retinal scanning system. Trained as a biomedical engineer at Stanford and USC, she is turning high-resolution eye imaging plus AI into a way to detect and monitor brain and eye conditions far outside the walls of a clinic. JuneBrain has raised more than $3 million in private capital, won $3 million in NSF grants, holds four issued patents, and is on track for an FDA submission.
Jason Ehrlich
Jason Ehrlich is the co-founder and CEO of Ollin Biosciences, an Austin-based clinical-stage biopharma launched in September 2025 with $100 million to build best-in-disease eye medicines. An MD-PhD ophthalmologist trained at Princeton and Stanford, he spent a decade at Genentech/Roche helping shepherd retina drugs including Lucentis and the bispecific faricimab (Vabysmo), then served five years as chief medical and development officer at Kodiak Sciences. At Ollin he is taking direct aim at the market leader: in early 2026 his lead asset OLN324 beat faricimab head-to-head in a randomized Phase 1b study, drying retinas faster and deeper with a clean safety record.
Bing Li
Bing Li is the CEO and co-founder of Intalight, an ophthalmic imaging company behind the DREAM OCT swept-source platform. Founded in 2014 by a group of scientists and Silicon Valley industry veterans, Intalight built one of the first swept-source OCT devices in 2019 and has since powered more than 170 peer-reviewed retinal-imaging studies. Trained as an engineer and applied mathematician, Li moved from the auto and semiconductor industries into eye care, betting that faster, deeper, wider retinal scans would change how clinicians see inside the eye. In May 2025 the company won CE Mark clearance to sell DREAM OCT across the European Union, with FDA review pending in the United States.
Liane Clamen
Liane Clamen is a Harvard-trained ophthalmologist and the founder and CEO of Adaptilens, a Newton, Massachusetts biotech building a biomimetic accommodating intraocular lens that imitates the young human lens so cataract patients can see near, intermediate, and distance without glasses. She sketched the idea more than two decades ago, fought the patent office to a 2019 grant, and in April 2024 closed a $17.5 million Series A to push the device toward its first human trial.
Rui Jing
Rui Jing Jiang is the Founder and CEO of Avisi Technologies, a Redwood City-based clinical-stage medical device company developing VisiPlate, the world's thinnest freestanding ophthalmic implant for treating glaucoma. Built on University of Pennsylvania nanotechnology, VisiPlate is a multichannel aqueous shunt composed of alumina and Parylene-C that is 20 times thinner than a human hair. Rui Jing co-founded the company in 2017 as a junior at Penn's Wharton School, won the $100,000 President's Innovation Prize in 2018, secured FDA Investigational Device Exemption approval in October 2025 for the US SAPPHIRE trial, and closed a $10.7M Series A in February 2026 to advance pivotal clinical development.
Shawn O'Neil
Shawn O'Neil is the CEO of ViaLase, a clinical-stage medtech company building FLIGHT, an incision-free femtosecond laser procedure for glaucoma. He spent more than two decades at Alcon rising to head of sales and marketing for surgical glaucoma, then ran commercial at Sight Sciences before joining ViaLase as Chief Commercial Officer and stepping up to CEO in July 2025. His career has been a running tour of the products that reshaped eye surgery: EX-PRESS, LenSx, CyPass, OMNI, TearCare, and now a laser that treats glaucoma without ever touching the eye with a blade.
Scott Xiao
Scott Xiao is the co-founder and CEO of Luminopia, a Boston-area digital therapeutics company whose lead product turns watching cartoons in a VR headset into an FDA-approved treatment for amblyopia, the leading cause of vision loss in children. He left Harvard with classmate Dean Travers to build the first VR-based therapeutic ever cleared by the FDA, partnering with Sesame Workshop, Nickelodeon, and DreamWorks for content and with Boston Children's Hospital and MIT for the science.
Andrew Huberman
Andrew Huberman is a tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine and the host of the Huberman Lab podcast - regularly ranked the #1 health and science podcast in the world with over 400 episodes. His Stanford lab investigates visual system repair, neural plasticity, and stress resilience, publishing in Nature, Science, and Cell. A former skateboarder who once wrote for Thrasher magazine and lobbied the Palo Alto city council to build a skate park at age 13, Huberman translates complex neuroscience into actionable protocols for millions of listeners globally.
Jacob Borrajo
Jacob Borrajo is the Founder and CEO of Amber Bio, a Cambridge-based biotech company pioneering a first-of-its-kind RNA writing platform capable of multi-kilobase edits. With a PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT and research training at the Broad Institute, Borrajo has spent his career building at the intersection of CRISPR, machine learning, and synthetic biology. Amber Bio launched in August 2023 with a $26 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Playground Global, with strategic participation from Eli Lilly and the Retinal Degeneration Fund. His platform's key innovation: treating diseases with high allelic diversity using a single therapeutic product, by editing RNA rather than DNA - making gene therapy safer, reversible, and dramatically more scalable.
Robert Chang
Robert Chang is the President and CEO of Myra Vision, a Campbell, California medtech company developing the Calibreye Titratable Glaucoma Therapy (TGT) Surgical System - an adjustable aqueous shunt designed to give glaucoma surgeons real-time, non-invasive control over intraocular pressure. With over 30 years of medical device executive experience spanning co-founding Ample Medical, leading MVRx, and serving as CTO at Sadra Medical (acquired by Boston Scientific), Chang brings a rare combination of hands-on engineering depth and serial CEO-level leadership to one of ophthalmology's most intractable surgical challenges. Myra Vision has raised $50M+ across seed, Series A, and a $25M Series B in 2023, and in early 2026 enrolled its first patient in the FDA-approved ADAPT pivotal study.
Diana Peng Bockus
Diana Peng Bockus is the Chief Executive Officer of NGM Biopharmaceuticals, a South San Francisco biotech developing first-in-class medicines for liver disease, oncology, and ophthalmology. Appointed CEO in April 2025, she joined the company in 2020 to lead business development and restructured a pivotal Merck partnership that freed NGM to build a wholly owned pipeline. A Stanford and Wharton graduate with roots in management consulting at Bain & Company, she now steers a privately held biotech backed by $515M in total funding, focused on rare diseases like primary sclerosing cholangitis and hyperemesis gravidarum.