As VisionQuest Biomedical Inc. continues to build out its diabetic disease-detecting products thanks to a recent chunk of federal grant money, the Albuquerque biotech company tapped a new CEO to lead its growth.
Sarah Soliz is VisionQuest's new CEO. She previously worked as executive vice president and chief marketing officer for the company, which is based at 2501 Yale Blvd. SE, Suite 301.
She steps into the role as VisionQuest's previous CEO and senior research scientist, Vinayak Joshi, Ph.D., transitions away from the company to spin out his own firm. Before Joshi, Peter Soliz, Ph.D., served as CEO; Peter Soliz founded the company in 2007.
"I just really think of myself in some ways as a support person for everyone else in the company," Sarah Soliz told Albuquerque Business First. "But of course, also trying to bring everybody's work together in a coherent way and keep us going in a direction that's going to be fruitful for our scientists and for the people we're aiming to help out in the world."
VisionQuest's biomedical software products are aimed at detecting and diagnosing retinopathy — an eye condition that can cause vision loss and blindness. Two of its products — called EyeStar and i-RxTherm — are built to detect diabetic retinopathy, and the company has a third product, called Aspire, that helps detect malarial retinopathy, a similar eye condition caused by malarial disease.
A group of diabetes clinics in Mexico has used some of the company's EyeStar products since 2016, Sarah Soliz said. A prototype of one of the company's i-RxTherm products is currently being used at the University of New Mexico's Diabetes Research and Treatment Center, as well, she added.
Back in October 2022, VisionQuest landed a $1 million commercialization readiness grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases — part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — for its i-RxTherm device. Sarah Soliz said the company has about a year left on that funding to continue research and development and work on a minimum viable product.
And, recently, VisionQuest was awarded a $274,000 NIH Phase I diabetic retinopathy compliance grant for continued product development. Money from grants provides most of the financial backing for the company, she said.
But more product-based revenue could start flowing in the near future thanks to a licensing agreement for VisionQuest's EyeStar product with another biotech company. Soliz couldn't disclose the name of that company but she said it's in the process of raising money for a clinical trial before finalizing approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to take that product to market in the U.S.
VisionQuest also started early market discovery for another software device it's working on, called BIO-Insight. Soliz, principal investigator Jeff Wigdahl, Ph.D., and Chris Japp, a former bioscience executive, interviewed around 100 ophthalmologists and other industry experts as part of the NIH's I-CORPS program. That entrepreneurial training program is designed for companies that have received Small Business Innovation Research or Small Business Technology Transfer funding.
