Siloton

Siloton Wins a Global Recognition Award 2026

She is 74 years old, lives in rural Somerset, and has age-related macular degeneration. Her last hospital OCT scan was six months ago. Her next appointment is three months away. Somewhere in that nine-month window, her retina may be changing — and no one will know until she sits in a clinic chair. For over 600,000 patients like her across the UK alone, and 20 million more worldwide, the gap between diagnosis and monitoring is not a scheduling inconvenience. It is a corridor where preventable blindness begins. Siloton, a Bristol-based health technology startup, has earned a 2026 Global Recognition Award for closing that corridor — by fitting a hospital’s worth of retinal imaging equipment onto a chip smaller than a £1 coin. With a world-first clinical milestone, three granted patents, and £1.7 million raised from Evenlode Foundation, South East Angels, the Francis Crick Institute, and Innovate UK, the company has moved the diagnostic imaging industry to a place it has never been before.

Technical Innovation and Architecture

Conventional Optical Coherence Tomography systems are optical engineering achievements built for clinical environments. They use precisely aligned mirrors, lenses, and beam splitters through which light travels in open air. Any vibration, any temperature change, and the alignment shifts. These systems cost £30,000 to £100,000, occupy entire desks, and require trained technicians to operate. Siloton’s Akepa™ chip replaces all of that with silicon. Over 300 optical and electronic elements are integrated onto a single photonic chip — 70% of the complete OCT system, on-chip. Light travels through etched silicon waveguides, microscopic solid-state pathways, instead of through air. There are no mirrors to align. There is no mechanical drift. There is no fragility. The physics is the same; the form factor is entirely different.

The chip is fabricated in a commercial semiconductor foundry using standard manufacturing processes — the same industrial infrastructure that produces processors and memory chips at billions of units per year. This is not a laboratory curiosity; it is a product with a clear, high-volume manufacturing route. The proprietary Redfield™ component library provides photonic circuit building blocks optimized specifically for OCT, enabling rapid design iteration and customization across different medical specialties. Three granted patents protect the company’s core innovations: on-chip compensation for retinal distance variation, an optical structure that maintains signal quality while miniaturizing, and binocular imaging capability — screening both eyes with a single device, without doubling the component count. In November 2024, using this technology, Siloton became the first commercial organization in the world to capture a sub-surface image of a living human retina with chip-based OCT. The clinical case for the platform is no longer theoretical.

Market Strategy and Leadership

CEO Dr. Alasdair Price and CTO Dr. Euan Allen co-founded Siloton in April 2020 alongside Dr. Ben Hunt, meeting through Bristol’s research ecosystem and sharing a conviction that silicon photonics had reached the maturity point needed to make portable OCT commercially viable. The founding approach was a study in discipline: Allen built the proof-of-concept for under £20,000, in his own home, using salvaged lab components and a photonic chip obtained free from a foundry. The team proved the technology worked before asking investors for money — and attracted capital based on results rather than projections. Price’s prior role as Commercialisation and Technology Development Lead at the University of Bristol gave the company a founder who understood IP strategy, clinical market entry, and customer validation from day one. In 2023, the Institute of Physics awarded Price and Allen the Clifford Paterson Medal & Prize — one of the UK’s most prestigious applied physics honors — specifically for developing and commercializing this platform.

The company’s market positioning is deliberately asymmetric. Rather than competing against Zeiss, Heidelberg Engineering, or Topcon for hospital system contracts — a market defined by long sales cycles, high switching costs, and entrenched relationships — Siloton targets the massive, currently unserved population of patients who cannot access OCT at all: those monitored at home, those in primary care, and those in rural or low-resource healthcare settings across the developing world. This blue-ocean approach means Siloton’s total addressable market is not a slice of the existing OCT equipment market; it is the market that does not yet exist. The revenue model operates on two tracks: B2B OCT-Chip Development Kits and customization packages for medical device OEMs entering the photonic chip space, and a proprietary direct-to-clinic ophthalmic OCT system under development for Siloton’s own label.

Industry Impact and Future Vision

The numbers behind Siloton’s problem are not abstract. Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of sight loss in the developed world. Over 600,000 UK patients require monitoring every 4–12 weeks. NHS ophthalmology is the country’s busiest outpatient specialty, and waiting times already stretch to months. Each delayed scan is a window during which the disease can progress past the point at which treatment remains effective. Siloton’s chip reduces the physical and economic barriers to OCT, moving it from a large hospital installation to a device that can sit on a bedside table. Moving it to OCT, for elderly patients with mobility limitations, and for working-age adults who cannot take repeated time off. For residents of regions where no ophthalmologist operates, this shift is not incremental — it changes what care is actually available to them. Cathy Yelf, CEO of the Macular Society, has publicly endorsed the technology, calling it a genuine and critical gap in UK sight care.

Beyond ophthalmology, the Akepa™ platform’s OCT capability extends to intravascular cardiology, dermatology for skin cancer detection, and oncology for tumor margin assessment. This multi-specialty roadmap expands the company’s long-term addressable market well beyond the 20 million AMD patients it currently targets. As semiconductor manufacturing costs continue their historical decline, the unit economics of chip-based OCT improve automatically — the same structural force that made smartphones affordable will, in time, make retinal scanners affordable. Siloton’s roadmap points toward medical device regulatory approval, scaled OEM partnerships, and an eventual consumer-facing monitoring product. The company earns the 2026 Global Recognition Award because it has already done the most challenging part: it proved the science, built the chip, imaged the living human retina, and mapped a credible path from a home workbench in Bristol to a device on the nightstand of every patient who needs it.