It was thanks to Price’s experience in studying photonic chips at the University of Bristol, originally for quantum computing and cryptography purposes, that he drew on learnings made there to turn his attention to creating a device that could be used to scan for chronic eye conditions.

“The key thing with quantum technologies is that they rely on single particles of light, meaning you have to design chips in a way that ensures you don’t lose any of that light,” explained Price.

Eye scanning operates by following light into the eye and measuring what reflects back out. “But obviously the eye is designed to absorb light,” Price continued. “So those design techniques that were focused on making sure we kept these single particles of light flowing through the system means we could build the chips in a way that worked really well for eye scanning.”

After getting an enterprise fellowship at an incubator called QTEC (which no longer exists), Price set up Siloton.

“Normally when you’re developing these chips you develop it in an optics lab, which is vibrationally stable,” said Price. “You have tables that are set up with special feet to dampen any oscillations. You also have well-controlled temperature and humidity.

“We didn’t have that because we were [working] during COVID and had no money … we built the proof-of-concept in our CTO’s dining room.”

In spite of these circumstances – with dusty “Victorian floorboards” that presented an additional challenge for R&D – today Siloton is continuing to develop its technology: eye scanners powered by its photonic chip targeted at people suffering with chronic eye conditions, such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

As well as prototyping chips on dining tables, another consequence of COVID was a tough investing environment. “Investors shut up shop, so everyone had to push their timelines out on raising, then when people did start investing again, there was a massive backlog of capital ,” said Price. “The consequence of that was so many startups were being funded that when capital started to dry up again, there were more companies competing for money.”

Early intervention into eye conditions

Currently, hospitals use optical coherence tomography (OCT), a non-invasive form of eye imaging that scans the eye to create pictures and determine if
there are any conditions of which the patient is unaware. The problem being, the patient may be developing an eye condition and be completely unaware of the fact. They don’t know what they are looking for, in other words, and early intervention into eye conditions is difficult. Coupled with a lack of access to OCT machines in some countries, the value of Siloton’s technology becomes clear.

“The ideal clinical approach is to do home monitoring, because then you could scan a couple of times a week,” said Price. “The disease is very personal. You can’t point [at] someone and say, ‘I know how your disease is going to progress’. You only find that out as time goes on and [it] can change very quickly. So if you could scan a couple of times a week rather than once a month … then that could give you a lot more information on disease.”

Siloton’s eye scanners work by utilising a small laser which goes into a beam splitter, also known as a semi-reflective mirror. Half of the light goes into
the eye, and the other half is stored within the device. Some of the light that does go into the eye is reflected out, forming wave patterns when it interacts with the light stored in the device. Using those patterns, the company can perform mathematical transformations to create “something that looks like an ultrasound”, but is in fact an OCT image. Unlike in hospital systems, which can be roughly the size of a cash machine, this has been obtained using a photonic chip smaller than a £1 coin.

This OCT will provide a look under the surface of the retina. “That’s really important because for a lot of diseases … you get signs underneath the retina before it affects your vision.” Traditional cameras typically look at the top of the retina rather than underneath and won’t provide the same kind of insight.

Highlights and next steps

Siloton is in the process of commercialising its eyes scanners to further its mission of making eye scanning more affordable and accessible for the masses, particularly for countries where the care for eye conditions varies widely. This year, it will be imaging its first patients to validate the technology and show it can pick up on disease.

“The problem we’re trying to solve is [that] people are going into hospital not knowing whether they need to go in, because they don’t know how much their disease has progressed by, and can’t get the eye scan until they get into the hospital,” Price summarised.

They’ll also be concentrating on developing the form factor of the eye scanner based on patient feedback. Going into it, Price said, they anticipated designing a VR-style headset which would go over the patient’s head, but feedback informed them differently.

“There were various reasons why [it didn’t work],” he said. “Claustrophobia, difficulty getting it on and off, things like that. They were all big fans of the binocular-style system which we were worried about because we thought it might not be stable enough. We did another set of focus groups where with that binocular system, we got eye tracking to monitor how stable it was, and we compared that with a traditional system.”

As a result, they created a binocular-style system that they were then able to ensure could be stable for the period of time needed to perform the eye scan. The highlights for Siloton has been imaging its first healthy human - reflecting the progress the company has made since it began - creating its
first-generation photonic chip, and growing the team.

“Seeing how the company has started to grow and take on a life of its own has been really rewarding,” Price concluded.

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Startups Magazine. Click here to subscribe