Inventor peddles lens sanitizer to big firms

A local inventor says he has come up with a foolproof solution for the eye-infection liability woes faced by contact lens makers such as Bausch & Lomb Inc. But he laments what he says are the companies’ lack of interest.
Chemist Alan Burris is an award-winning inventor. President of Alab LLC, a privately owned research and development laboratory in Rush, he was formerly a research scientist for E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.
As a private operator, Burris has developed and patented ozone-employing sanitizing devices under the QuickPure brand name, which he hopes to market or license to major consumer products firms.
Devices under the QuickPure umbrella include a prize-winning countertop water purifier, an oral care device that can cure gingivitis and a device that cheaply and reliably sterilizes contact lenses, he said.
Only one QuickPure product, a diffuser for use in water purification plants, has been commercialized and its success is modest, Burris said. But he is hopeful of a breakthrough on the lens-sanitizing front.
Burris is concentrating on the lens sanitizer, which he presents as the answer to ills faced by Bausch & Lomb, which has been dealing with a rash of consumer complaints over eye infections linked to its ReNu with Moistureloc multipurpose lens solution for some two years.
Bausch & Lomb pulled ReNu with Moistureloc from store shelves in 2006 after the Food and Drug Administration found an associative link of the all-purpose lens solution to fungal eye infections, some serious enough to cause blindness. Some 12 months ago Bausch & Lomb filed a Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure detailing its ReNu with Moistureloc legal woes. The company at that time was looking at more than 500 lawsuits filed by consumers claiming ReNu with Moistureloc-related ills.
Bausch & Lomb and other contact lens companies’ multipurpose lens-care products remain off the shelves and are under FDA scrutiny.
Burris sees an opening for his QuickPure lens sanitizer after the presentation of a paper by the American Academy of Optometry to the FDA in June critiqued multipurpose lens care solutions made by Bausch & Lomb and a California-based competitor, Advanced Medical Optics Inc., as inadequate to control the eye-infection-causing organisms. Like Bausch & Lomb, AMO voluntarily pulled a multipurpose lens-care product off of store shelves after problems with eye infections surfaced.
Burris’ lens sanitizer is a box roughly the size of a cigarette pack. A clear tube filled with saline solution fits into a hole in the top of the device, which sends ozone bubbling up through the solution. Lenses to be sterilized are placed in the tube and ozone dissolved in the solution kills all microorganisms present in four minutes, Burris said.
While Burris believes the QuickPure lens sanitizer is effective and safe, the device would have to undergo extensive testing and win FDA approval before it could be sold commercially. As an independent researcher of relatively modest means, Burris said, he is not in a position to finance that effort.
“That’s why I’d like to find some company to license it and get it approved. It wouldn’t have to be Bausch & Lomb. I’ve contacted them and AMO,” Burris said.
Even more than with the lens makers, he would like to strike a licensing deal with Procter & Gamble Co., Burris said. But like the lens makers, the consumer products giant has not responded to his feelers. Burris said he would also be open to any private investors willing to back further lens-sanitizer development.
Bausch & Lomb spokesman Michael McDougal said he could not with any certainty say whether the eye-care company had received solicitations from Burris or what the company might have done to investigate Burris’ device if it had.
“We get product solicitations all the time,” McDougal said. “They get passed on to research and development. They look into them.”
Burris said he demonstrated the lens sanitizer to a group of Bausch & Lomb scientists several years ago, long before the ReNu with Moistureloc flap. The company’s scientists were impressed with the device, Burris said, but a higher official nixed any follow through. All parties involved in that demonstration left Bausch & Lomb after it was sold and taken private last year, he said.
“If they’d have listened to me, they probably could be saving themselves $1 billion or so,” Burris said.
Though Burris tends to blame the world for not beating a path to his door, in at least one instance, he appears to have turned his back on a deal that could have netted him millions.
In 1999, after the QuickPure water purification device won first prize in Hammacher Schlemmer & Co. Inc.’s Search for Inventions ’99 contest, Burris came close to closing a deal to license the device to Gillette Co., which was considering marketing it through its Braun division.
Diane Harris, president of the Pittsford-based Hypotenuse Enterprises Inc., helped negotiate the deal with Gillette. The razor blade company offered Burris $5 million up front and a “very generous” percentage of sales as a royalty, she said.
“It was one of the best licensing deals I’ve ever seen,” she said.
The terms initially were as Harris describes, Burris said. But those in a later iteration were not nearly as good, motivating him to turn their final contract offer down.
Harris, who praises Burris as “a highly talented inventor,” recalls it differently.
“In these kinds of negotiations, the terms start out general and have to be reduced to specifics,” she said. “But this did not get to a final stage. (Burris) walked away because he thought he could get a better deal.”
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11/28/2008 (C) Rochester Business Journal