Engineering news
Bristol start-up Siloton received an £8.4m contract from the UK Research and Innovation body to accelerate development of the GiraffeOCT system, it announced today (14 October).
Designed to make detection of retinal diseases more accessible to patients, the optical coherence tomography (OCT) device uses light to create detailed pictures of the inside of the eye, helping clinicians identify a range of conditions and monitor their progress over time.
Use of OCT has been limited because existing systems are large, expensive and typically only available in hospitals and optometry clinics, making access difficult – particularly for people living in rural and remote communities. As a result, ophthalmology is the busiest NHS outpatient specialty, with about nine million visits in England during 2023/24. At the end of July 2026, nearly 623,000 people were on the waiting list for an appointment, representing 8.7% of all NHS waits.
Siloton’s GiraffeOCT is designed as an easy-to-use, binocular-style system that makes the process more affordable and accessible – whether in a clinic or at home – compressing a tabletop’s worth of heavy, expensive and fragile components onto a chip smaller than a £1 coin.
The new two-year contract will help Siloton accelerate the design of the clinic and at-home versions, as well as complete trials on both systems. The start-up expects the funding could cut the development process by up to two years.
“Winning this Innovate UK contract allows us to accelerate the development of our systems, explore manufacturing and assembly in the UK, and help a groundbreaking new technology be adopted by the NHS more quickly,” said CEO Alasdair Price.
“Many early-stage companies struggle to get beyond the well-known ‘valley of death’ in developing new products – particularly in healthcare – but this will support us through that crucial phase, bringing the Siloton system closer to being in patients’ hands and building a technology that can be used worldwide.”
Siloton will work with Sunderland Specialist Eye Hospital on clinical trials, giving patients across the North East and North Cumbria access to the technology during its development. York Health Economics Consortium will use trial data to refine cost-saving estimates for the NHS.
“Developing the in‑clinic and at‑home versions of the system will help the government meet its ambitions of moving care into the community and bringing quantum technologies into the NHS,” Price said. “The contract will also allow us to expand our technology to cover a wider range of diseases, integrate our second‑generation BlueJay chip – the same architecture used in our system for astronauts – and build out the cloud platform that underpins the service.”
The company plans to raise further investment, supporting development of its second-generation CheetahOCT device, specifically designed to measure different layers of the retina and expand the number of conditions it can detect.
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