SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ENTERPRISE : Seeing Is Believing : Rancho Cucamonga Firm’s Glaucoma Valve Looks Like a Hit

He has a medical degree, a doctorate in engineering, 14 years as a university professor and more than 100 research papers to his credit, but Mateen Ahmed is basically a tinkerer.

He proudly lists on his resume more than 20 U.S. patents and inventions. At any moment he is likely to grab a scrap of paper or run to a chalkboard to enthusiastically diagram yet another idea.

“This is my amusement. This is real fun,” Ahmed says of his life’s work.

Now, one of Ahmed’s ideas--a tiny valve inserted on the eyeball to treat glaucoma--stands to bring in more than $2 million in sales this year.

The Ahmed Glaucoma Valve, manufactured by Ahmed’s own company, New World Medical Inc. in Rancho Cucamonga, costs $575. Inserted during a 30-minute operation using local anesthesia, the device has already been installed in more than 5,000 people worldwide and is favorably analyzed in a prestigious medical journal.

But getting this far, Ahmed says, has been a 12-year voyage in which he successfully sued others who tried to steal his idea, had to quit a lucrative university post, beg start-up funds from family members, push the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval and, finally, embark on an aggressive marketing campaign that has seen sales of his valve increase 25% a month for the past six months.

The market is certainly there. It is estimated that more than 2.5 million people in the United States have severe glaucoma, and more than 28,000 from 1984 to 1990 have undergone surgery for the condition, according to statistics from the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Bob Fite, co-owner with Ahmed of New World Medical, says the company hopes to capture 70% of the market by this time next year.

“Other methods are imprecise,” Ahmed says. “Our valve is precise.”

Achieving precision is one of the problems in treating glaucoma with surgery, doctors say.

Glaucoma is a condition in which excessive fluid builds up in a tiny space called the anterior chamber behind the cornea of the eye. The pressure of the fluid forces the larger eyeball behind the cornea to push back against the optic nerve, ultimately resulting in nerve damage and blindness.

The pressure can be relieved with eyedrops, oral medication and, in severe cases, surgery. But the surgical approach is imprecise, said Anne Coleman, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA, because the amount of liquid drained cannot be regulated. To drain the fluid, surgeons either cut a hole in the anterior chamber or insert a tube into it.

Ahmed says his valve remedies this problem. To use it, a tube is inserted in the anterior chamber that leads directly to the valve mechanism, which consists of a tiny folded piece of silicone rubber secured between two pieces of plastic. The rubber’s tension controls the release of fluids. With the rubber stretched to a certain tension, eye liquids at a lower pressure cannot escape. But once pressure builds to the higher levels consistent with glaucoma, the valve is forced open and liquid flows out. The fluids flow harmlessly onto surrounding eye tissue and are absorbed by the body.

Ahmed, who is from a large Indian family in which 22 cousins are physicians, says his zeal for inventing was naturally directed toward medical ends. He pursued graduate studies in both medicine and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi.

The idea for the valve occurred to Ahmed in Nigeria, where he went in 1981 as a hospital systems consultant with the University of Ilorin. Hospitals there were filled with victims of river blindness, glaucoma caused by the bite of a mosquito prevalent in some African countries.

He began puzzling how to use a valve to treat the condition and came up with a several ideas, none of them successful. In 1986, when he had become a professor of biomedical engineering at Cal Poly Pomona, the solution came to him one afternoon as he was sitting in his garage in La Verne. Excited, he sought out a medical products company to manufacture his invention--only to sue the company in disappointment a year later when, he says, company officials locked him out of their offices and tried to claim his ideas as their own.

Ahmed finally began manufacturing the valves out of Fite’s garage. Using $10,000 of his Cal Poly retirement money, Ahmed moved the company into a small Rancho Cucamonga office and held an open house, gathering another $40,000 from investors, mainly friends and family members. Altogether, the company has managed to keep going with $700,000 from investors and from loans Ahmed, Fite and co-owner Gerardo Lugo secured on their homes.

The valve was sold abroad first. The company could not sell it in the United States until FDA approval was secured after numerous delays in November, 1993. The company then began concentrating on its primary market in the United States, promoting the valve with brochures and instruction videos and conducting laboratory sessions using animal eyes to teach doctors how to insert the device. Fite also came up with the idea of giving away plastic models of eyeballs with the device attached and big white buttons reading “Rest Easy, the Ahmed Valve.”

An article about the valve will be published in the July issue of the American Journal of Ophthalmology. Roy Wilson, dean of the faculty at Drew University College of Medicine in Los Angeles and a contributor to the article, said he has tried all the other implants available and now uses only the Ahmed valve.

But Coleman, the author of the article who also has implanted the devices herself, reported a 78% success rate, meaning that once inserted, complications arise in 22% of the cases. Yet she said complications are typical of most glaucoma surgeries regardless of the device--and added that the Ahmed valve appears more successful than others at the preventing complications typically seen in the first week after surgery.

With his first device successfully launched, Ahmed is now busy jetting worldwide to promote it and also working here on others. His zeal for invention manifests itself in his rapid-fire speech as he skips joyfully from talk about one invention to another. He will impulsively pull out a section of hose from an envelope to demonstrate an idea for an arterial valve or leap to a nearby marker board to spell out some technical term.

Ahmed credits God as the source of all his ideas. He devoutly insists that any reference to his accomplishments include mention of him as only an instrument in the work of God. Even his desire to start his own company producing medical devices he attributes to more than self-interest.

“What is the use of doing something that doesn’t help humanity?” he asks.