ESCRS 2023: Managing directors from Heidelberg Engineering preview Orbis partnership

During the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons (ESCRS) meeting in Vienna, Austria, Heidelberg Engineering and Orbis announced a new partnership that pairs excellence in ocular imaging with accessible ophthalmic education. To find out more about the programme, we spoke with Arianna Schoess Vargas, managing director of Heidelberg Engineering, and Tosh Vadhia, managing director of Heidelberg Engineering UK.

Editor's note: the following transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity.

Arianna Schoess Vargas: My name is Arianna Schoess Vargas, I'm managing director of Heidelberg Engineering. I got really excited when I was told that Orbis approached us for a partnership because this is–of course, we come from the industry side. But we have this mission of trying to elevate the research community and try to contribute to that and to see what we can do with all the research. So it was exciting for me that we can support their research and also on the education front.

This is something that Heidelberg has been passionate about, pretty much since its inception, that we want to train doctors and young doctors on how to use imaging, how to use our equipment in their daily clinic, and how it can transform their clinical practice. Because it's very important: if you want to be confident in your decision-making, you need good information, but you also need to know what to do with that information. So we always have seen it as a thing to be paired together. And so it's exciting for us that we get a different reach with Orbis, to teach people from their, their community about what OCT can do for them.

Now, our Orbis program, we're focusing really on...on our expertise, I suppose, on OCT technology. Which is a relatively new technology and is helping doctors greatly to get insight into the eye, and has these beautiful structures and you can really see what's going on. That's our expertise. And this is what we're bringing to the doctors from the Orbis community as well.

Tosh Vadhia: I’m Tosh Vadhia, I'm the managing director of Heidelberg Engineering in the UK. Apart from advances in some of our medical devices like the ANTERION®, which is the anterior segment swept-source OCT , and the [inaudible] SPECTRALIS® OCT, we're really happy to announce our industry partnership with Orbis. Heidelberg Engineering and Orbis, supporting each other and the great walk that Orbis does.

I think that we've actually taken a surprising route of not only promoting and sponsoring some of their groundbreaking research, especially in the field of retinoblastoma. We're actually excited about some of the initial findings coming out at the Academy of Ophthalmology in the next few months. So we're looking to support that research. But also, the proud tradition that Heidelberg has in terms of OCT education, and how that can actually kind of segue into Orbis's great Cybersight program that they have, training and educating ophthalmologists from all over the world.

The long term partnership is we obviously are helping them in these two specific towers at the moment. But I would say that being able to help Orbis get more coverage and educate more doctors in the field is something that Heidelberg also are quite passionate about. One of our longest-running events that happens every year, the International SPECTRALIS Symposium, sees ophthalmologists from all over the world come to get educated in the Heidelberg way of OCT education, and that's something that we can translate and create a strong partnership with Orbis over many years to come.