Over the years, RANZCO has become a delightful congress on a professional level, but also on a highly personal one.
My colleague Brandon Winkeler and I often think as Australia modernizes, it has a lot to offer that America – our land by birthright – does not.
But we put that theory to the test and made a major part of our visit to tour greater Adelaide, with our wonderful host, Kate Hunt, CCO of Nova Eye Medical.
Many many months before, over a LinkedIn post, I promised Kate that I wouldn’t miss Adelaide for the rest of the conference world, and I tried very hard to live up to that.
So, I packed my luggage (and my fake Mona Lisa) – more on that later – and set off to Adelaide to spend some time with Brandon, Brandon’s family and Kate, around Adelaide.
Oh yeah, and… I went to The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists (RANZCO)‘s 55th Annual Scientific Congress (RANZCO 2024).
Dr. Lubeck used to spend most of his living time in Chicago, and a portion each year in Adelaide. Now, he’s switched it up, to spend most of his time in Adelaide and a smaller portion in Chicago.
From what I understand, he will continue to have surgical rights in Adelaide. And, he’s also investing in a Yoga studio – how cool?!
I like the idea of Dr. Lubeck, who was a silversmith prior to becoming an ophthalmologist, now finding yet another passion in his later years.
It reminds me of my father, Dennis Young, who became one of Delaware’s most acclaimed artists after more than 30 years of practicing psychiatry.
It gives me hope that for all those who have given so much to society as doctors, life holds fresh experiences – and even second vocations – still for those who care to look. Sometimes those vocations might be called hobbies. Sometimes those hobbies might be called pastimes. Sometimes those pastimes could be, well, nothing at all.
In life, I find it’s just as important to come upon the concept of being – or living – instead of always doing. The enjoyment of stillness can be absolutely incredible, although I wrestle with that as one who travels so much.
So you do you, Dr. Lubeck. Or better yet, you be you.
So back to Kate, and yes, my fake Mona Lisa.
Kate Hunt, Dana Popescu and the Nova Eye Medical team, along with Team Media MICE, executed our first TV-esque commercial together prior to the 128th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO 2024). Here’s the video if you haven’t seen it yet:
Brandon Winkeler and I thought it would be great fun to bring the fake Mona Lisa, which was used in our studio in Hanoi during filming, to Kate as a humorous gift.
By the way, the campaign’s thrust was: “iTrack Advance: Choose the original, not an imitation. Like the Mona Lisa, there is only one original masterpiece of canaloplasty.”
In the commercial, we used a fake Mona Lisa being revealed at a dinner party as a kind of metaphor.
I was a little worried about bringing a fake Mona Lisa through Australia’s tight border security, having seen all the shows on TV. Apparently, it wasn’t the Mona they were concerned with. It was my passport itself, wherein the electronic chip broke, and it took an extra 30 minutes through customs with some pretty severe questioning.
Anyway, it was all worth it as seeing the look on Kate’s face was priceless.
Kate, meanwhile, was the most gracious host.
She took Brandon (and his whole family) and me strawberry picking, visiting koalas and kangaroos, and to Dr. Lubeck’s house for a glorious lunch by beautiful vineyards.
Recently, in pondering my greatest business strength, colleague Robert Anderson suggested I was “King of the Oblique Play.”
While trying to explain this to friend Dr. Tanya Trinh over breakfast, she immediately grasped the concept and turned it back on me, kind of reminiscent of Margot Robbie explaining subprime mortgages in The Big Short.
To paraphrase (liberally), according to Dr. Trinh, it went something like this:
Imagine you go to a nightclub. There’s the ordinary queue, where everybody is waiting in a long line and who knows if you get in or not.
There’s the VIP entry, in which you might get access to by birthright or by being extremely lucky. No, either way, you’re extremely lucky.
But if you go around the corner and down the alleyway, there’s this scraggy opening to something — not sure quite what. You push that open a wee bit and it’s some random narrow passage leading to a bathroom with a locked door but busted-out window. You pivot yourself over the jagged window onto broken glass and carefully make it to the other side where there’s an open door to the club and behind the velveted roped section. Free entry, no queue and your choice to go dancing or hang in the VIP.
Therein lies the oblique play in business. It’s not direct, it’s not lucky and it’s not obvious. But it exists and if you hit it just right — obliquely — you can find yourself to be the king of the hill, or at least a Jack.
To be fair, there are a lot of routes to business success. But this is mine, and the side benefit is: that it also happens to be the most interesting.
Thanks for explaining it back to me so clearly, Dr. Trinh!
As my colleague Brandon Winkeler and I came in for a selfie, Avni Parikh noticed we were these two towering figures suddenly, and we all had a laugh.
Which reminds me, I’m headed to the Tower of London this Friday in honor of the 75th Anniversary of Sir Harold Ridley’s IOL invention.
So many companies have advanced the IOL cause since then, and actually, at Media MICE, our first experience in the industry was helping to cover the B+L enVista IOL in the early 2010s, which was advanced as glistening-free. To think that was nearly 15 years ago…
Now, in October, the US FDA has approved the enVista Envy full range of vision IOL.
And so, the IOL legacy continues….
But the real honoree of the 75th Anniversary event is Rayner.
Sir Harold Ridley, John Pike of Rayner and John Holt, designed the first IOL, and Rayner produced this first lens, according to the company.
So while Team Rayner was launching their new RayOne Galaxy next-generation spiral IOL platform in Australia — thanks to Lisa Farquhar and Dave Maritz, and colleagues — more festivities are to be held all this week back in the UK.
Rayner hosted an Open Day on Nov 26 this week, with CEO Tim Clover and Dr. Graham Barrett, to show how an IOL is made at its manufacturing facility in Worthing.
But don’t worry. If you missed it, you can check out our Rayner Factory Tour video here, created during Media MICE’s visit to the facility just last year.
Oh, and it’s worth checking out the Rayner homepage, where you can just scroll down for great descriptions of the RayOne Galaxy.
Richard White, as I describe to anyone who ever asks about him, is the sales guru of APAC.
I always find his sales strategy to be next-level thinking, and so feel lucky to glean some pearls once in a while.
Richard also happens to be a part of a great company, that has supported rolling out refractive diagnostics to emerging Asia, as his predecessor in Asia for OCULUS, Lars Michael, shared in my AAO roundup.
Also – side note – I was impressed by the recent explanation Dr. Damien Gatinel takes us on a deep dive into the Pentacam Cornea OCT, showing how this tech marvel captures every corneal layer with mind-blowing precision.
Think of pinpointing scars, detecting irregularities and planning treatment with confidence—all down to the micron. Check out https://aktion.oculus.de/pentacam-cornea-oct/ for all the details.
Kylie Prince and I have known each other for what must be 10 years.
Originally, we met under the banner of Ellex, which was acquired by Lumibird Medical in recent years. An amazing “Ellex alumni” network thus seemed to form, informally, with Kate Hunt going off to Nova Eye, Lisa Farquhar going to Rayner and Kylie holding the fort down at Lumibird in APAC.
All three women have led inspired ophthalmic lives, and in my view, are among the most globalist of mindsets in Australia. Lumibird itself is an impressive company, specializing in laser technologies across industries, including telecommunications and aerospace outside of ophthalmology.
The company’s patient-centered approach drives the development of innovative laser and ultrasound solutions, designed in collaboration with healthcare professionals. These solutions target the leading causes of blindness, including cataracts, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration and dry eye, offering hope and improved vision to affected individuals.
I first heard about Clarus years ago in the US when Jose Castañon was still a marketing director of ZEISS. In fact, I still have my Apple note from 2017, which reads: “ZEISS is previewing ultra-wide field funds technology,” with a focus on “clarity, comfort, color, ultra-widefield.”
In 2024, Dane Moloney of ZEISS gave me a booth tour, and I came to learn ZEISS is focused on Clarus 700 in Australia, and the latest brochure reads: “Each CLARUS Tells a True Colour Story Worth Sharing.”
Notice the word spelled “colour” instead of “color.” Gotta love the Aussies!
Anyways, the brochure shows field-of-view comparisons between the Clarus and other OCTs. The difference is striking in clarity and color indeed. And as demonstrated to me this time at the ZEISS booth, if you zoom in on the image it doesn’t compromise the disc image. So you don’t need two cameras — one for the disc and one for widefield. This system does it all.
Speaking of things that happened years ago, Riccardo and I met at an All India Ophthalmological Society AIOS Conference (AIOC) sometime in the mid-2010s, when Espansione was presenting an earlier generation of a dry eye mask. I remember it well, as it had a green facade. The technology was great, and I looked forward to future updates.
Fast forward to today, and the new mask is white and ultra-modern. According to the company’s website: my-mask® enables a full therapy, covering both lower and upper eyelids, to grant maximum efficacy in treating dry eye Disease (DED) induced by meibomian glands dysfunction (MGD) and other ocular surface conditions.
Dr. Ben LaHood presented a fascinating lecture at RANZCO 2024 called High Refractive Error Decision Making Matrix — Cases, Controversies and Grey Zones.
He presented a series of challenging cases and then shared what he did in each case. One very special point about RANZCO, that I noticed, was during this lecture. The Aussies really get into Q&A, right from the auditorium audience. There is not much of a divide between the presenter and the audience, like at other conferences. So when I used the word “lecture” that is a bit of a misnomer. No one was really “lecturing” here.
There was instead a wonderful give and take about cases, and I suspect Dr. LaHood even learned some new pearls from the audience.
Certainly, this is a testament to Dr. LaHood’s engaging style of speaking, and his thought-provoking points — which makes him internationally renowned well beyond Australia.
But it’s also a testament to why my colleague Brandon and I keep coming back for more at RANZCO — the Aussie community spirit is alive and well. There is a zest for knowledge, life and bonding with one another that supports everything else.
As we at Media MICE have been delving deeper to learn more about the latest in ICL surgery, it was nice to hear Dr. Dr Alison Chiu ’s review of the procedure.
ICL surgery yields: a “higher definition” vision, which is interesting to think about as an adventure sports enthusiast. I’d be curious how much better I might see downstream pitfalls in a whitewater kayak, or trees when out skiing slopes. Very enticing.
The ICL also does not induce dry eye, it leaves the cornea untouched so there is no risk of ectasia, it offers UV protection, and although it is permanent, it is reversible as well, she noted.
This last fact, Dr. Chiu mentioned, is important to emphasize to patients.
“Your eye will change over time,” she advised to tell them and experience both presbyopia and cataracts.
She also advised saying: “Your vision will be very blurry immediately after the procedure. Go home and rest and when you wake in the morning your vision will be significantly clearer.”
After the presentations by Dr. LaHood and Dr. Chiu, Dr. Aanchal Gupta was one of those seated in the audience who came up and introduced herself. We’re LinkedIn friends and so it was great to finally meet her.
At RANZCO 2024, Dr. Gupta led the Alcon-hosted dinner symposium, bringing together a distinguished group of international and national experts. This event fostered collaboration and innovation, exploring how we can advance cataract surgery to benefit patients, the medical community, and society as a whole.
She also played a key role in co-chairing a Rapid Fire session on cataract, cornea and refractive surgery. This collaborative platform brought together experts to discuss groundbreaking developments, from corneal crosslinking to extended-depth-of-focus (EDoF) IOLs.
Since APVRS 2022 in Taipei, Rancy Khosla and I have been in touch, and we at Media MICE keep hearing more about their capable treatment for AMD. Certainly, the company has one of the premier treatments now in the space. We have come so far from the days of Macugen and simply trying to prevent further visual loss, instead of making visual gains.
Today, Roche’s faricimab (Vabysmo) is the first approved bispecific antibody uniquely engineered to block two key pathways driving retinal vascular disease by neutralizing Ang-2 and VEGF-A. The antibody’s dual action has been exhibiting positive results in the fight against multifactorial retinal diseases such as neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) and diabetic macular edema (DME).
It has been an incredible journey indeed.
Shane is one of the true veterans of our eye care industry. He’s also recently made a switch, from iCare to LKC Technologies. I’ve been consistently impressed by LKC as electroretinography has been on the scene for some time, but it’s such an important device for diagnosis that more and more people worldwide are coming to realize it, thanks also now to people like Shane. And of course, the always-charming and astute MonikA Ranta.
LKC’s RETeval® Device, the only FDA-cleared, portable, battery-powered, non-mydriatic ERG/VEP testing device, is making significant strides in eye care. Its user-friendly design and advanced technology are empowering healthcare providers worldwide.
The team at LKC truly is world-class, and so, expect this product to continue to make waves.
At APVRS 2015 in Sydney, Media MICE produced its first show daily in ophthalmology. Overnight printing of a conference daily always is stressful. You start with a blank sheet in the morning, and by midnight you’ve got to have the news fully filled out, designed and sent to the printer, for delivery at 8 am the next day.
Apart from that, you need sponsors to support your crew flying in, to be lodged and cover expensive overnight printing.
Alcon was there for us back then, supporting our daily with sponsored articles on — as I remember it — Jetrea – the first and only eye drug to treat sight-threatening vitreomacular traction and macular hole.
Nowadays, Alcon is continuing to make inroads into Australia, and globally. For one, I’m impressed with the success of NGENUITY 3D Visualization System in paving the way for next-generation surgical visualization. We see other competitors in the field now with updated visualization methods, but I’ll always fondly think back to NGENUITY as being the original, and truly, ingenious.
Well, I’m already back “up over” from “down under.” So indeed, I’m looking forward to seeing all m’eye friends this week at UKISCRS in London, my final conference of the year!
