User:Wikiman/Second Sight Medical Products Inc.

Second Sight Medical Products Inc., or Second Sight Inc. for short, is an American technology company headquartered in Sylmar, California, that designs, develops, and sells the Argus II bionic eye and is in the process of developing new technology platforms with the goal to provide vision to the blind.

History
Second Sight Inc. was founded in Sylmar, California, in 1998, by Alfred Mann, Samuel Williams, and Gunnar Bjorg. Williams, an investor in a cochlear implant company operated by Mann, approached Mann about founding a company to develop a similar product for the eye, and Mann called a meeting with the two of them and Robert Greenberg, who worked at Mann's foundation. Greenberg had previously worked on retinal prosthetics as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, and was appointed as CEO of the new company when it was launched. The first version of the prosthesis, the Argus I, was clinically tested on six people starting in 2002. The second version, the Argus II, was designed to be smaller and easier to implant, and was co-invented by Mark Humayun of the USC Eye Institute, who had been involved in the clinical testing of the Argus I. The Argus II was first tested in Mexico in 2006, and then a 30-person clinical trial was conducted in 10 medical centers across Europe and the United States.

Regulatory status
The Argus II received approval for commercial use in the European Union in March 2011. In February 2013, the FDA approved the Argus II under a humanitarian device exemption, authorizing its use for up to 4,000 people in the US per year.

Pricing and insurance
The Argus II was initially available at a limited number of clinics in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia, at an EU market price of US$115,000. When the Argus II launched in the United States in February 2013, Second Sight announced that it would be priced at around $150,000, excluding the cost of surgery and usage training. In August 2013, Second Sight announced that reimbursement payments had been approved for the Argus II for blind Medicare recipients in the United States.