Just days after officially launching its Institute for Digital Health (IDHea)—and acquiring Toku, Inc.—Topcon Healthcare, Inc., announced yet another new business development:
- A new strategic investment in health technology company Sanro Health, Inc.
Topcon sure has been busy lately.
Quite busy, to say the least. From acquisitions to other recent investments and product launches over the last 1.5 years, the Japanese-based ophthalmic medical devices and software solutions manufacturer has been making good on its Healthcare from the Eye initiative.
What to know about that initiative: As we’ve previously covered, this clinical strategy utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) disease detection and management with noninvasive retinal imaging.
- The intent: Enabling earlier detection and better management of ocular and systemic diseases.
Now let’s talk about Sanro.
Founded by retinal specialists in 2021, the Melbourne, Australia-based health-tech company brings together fragmented ophthalmic clinical data and medical images to make data usable and actionable—driving better patient outcomes.
Specifically: Sanro is utilizing its founders’ expertise in bioinformatics, interoperability, and clinical artificial intelligence (AI) to bring personalized research and medicine to the point of care for real-time decision making.
- Take note: In healthcare, interoperability refers to the ability of different health systems, software, and devices to talk to each other and understand the data they exchange—all to ensure patient information flows smoothly between hospitals, clinics, labs, and research systems.
Interesting … and what technology has the company developed for this?
That would be the Sanro Optimizer platform, its first product.
What it does: Integrates electronic medical record (EMR) and imaging data to create intelligent patient profiles and ranked cohorts in order to identify eligible participants for clinical trials during routine patient visits across eyecare providers (ECPs).
- Importantly: This identification is done in real time.
Explain how the system works.
The platform’s four-step process begins by:
- Connecting to a practice’s existing EMR and imaging data to unify and streamline all patient information
- This then creates a customized protocol-aligned module that’s tailored to match a clinical trial’s specific needs for better accuracy
- From there, the protocol utilizes intelligent (AI) algorithms to create patient profiles ranked by criteria-level evaluations, prioritizing the best-fit patients first
- A real-time evaluation of medical images and health records via these AI image analytics then rapidly identifies eligible participants
Talk more about this patient profiling component.
As we mentioned, the platform’s criterion-level evaluations help research teams see the most promising candidates first—and also enables them to:
- Track each patient’s status through to trial enrollment
- Retain a patient for future studies
- Capture insights to improve recruitment over time
Check out a visual of this dashboard.
So, who is this Sanro Optimizer intended for?
Two categories of researchers:
- Clinical trial sites interested in participant recruitment can book a demo with Sanro.
- Sponsors and clinical research organizations (CROs) can connect with Sanro to learn how their protocol can be turned into a live customized module to help sites with rapid patient identification capabilities.
Per Ashley Kras, MD, co-founder and CEO: “Sanro connects and interprets data so clinicians can see the full picture and researchers act faster.”
And what’s the advantage of a Topcon investment for Sanro?
Very simply: Advanced (and accelerated) U.S. expansion and product development of the Sanro Optimizer platform—including rollout across “leading clinical and research networks,” the company emphasized
To note: No monetary value was attached to this reported investment.
Lastly, circling back to Topcon, why make the investment?
With Sanro’s proprietary AI and interoperability framework enabling personalized research and care—the obvious reason is that its technology perfectly aligns withTopcon’s Healthcare from the Eye initiative.
And as Topcon’s CEO and President Ali Tafreshi noted, Sanro's “proven ability to deliver real-world clinical data and medical image interoperability make them an ideal partner.”
“By linking these data sets using agreed data standards, we can transform how patient care and research interconnect,” he stated.