Eye Health Hero: Eisuke SHIMIZU

“Eisuke is CEO and one of the 3 founders of OUI Inc., a Japanese medical startup from Keio University School of Medicine, with the goal to overcome world blindness by combining their knowledge in the field with new ideas to push the development of healthcare.

Through experience in eye camp in rural clinic in Vietnam, he found that the one of the major problems in global eyecare is that there is no diagnostic device in the areas where blindness is increasing. To solve this issue, he invented a device with his co-founders, the Smart Eye Camera (SEC), a smartphone attachment making it possible to diagnose the anterior part of the eye with equal functionality of exisiting slit-lamp microscopes.

He has been showing strong commitment and capacity to cover a wide range of fields.
His strong leadership has led to the outstanding growth of OUI Inc. since its foundation.
He was the one who invented SEC through lots of trial and error, and completed the registration to authorise it as an official medical device from Japanese Government.
Eisuke has also shown strong team-building skills as he has recruited over 15 members with strong competence/expertise in various fields such as global business, legal, marketing, hardware engineering, artificial intelligence (AI), and built the present OUI Inc. team. All members joined OUI Inc. with strong empathy and inspiration for his vision and leadership.

Moreover, Eisuke has taken a major role in forwarding our pilot project in Malawi starting from 2019, in partnership with Blantylre Institute of Community Outreach (BICO), also a member of IAPB. Through this pilot project in rural clinics in Malawi, we have confirmed large potential of SEC to make difference in prevention of world visual impairment and blindness.
Furthermore, he has also taken leading role in financial acquisition from Japanese government, VCs and international NGOs/donors to get funded to expand the impact of our activities.
He is now also project leader of developing artificial intelligence for eye diagnosis from the data collected by SEC.

In parallel with being an enthusiastic entrepreneur, he is an outstandingly passionate medical doctor/ researcher with a specialty in Dry Eye Disease and Ocular Allergic Disease. He is a Project associated lecturer/ Research Associate in the Department of Ophthalmology Keio University School of Medicine. Also, he runs his eye-clinic where he keeps gaining experience in clinical fields. As a researcher, he has published in many international journals.

“Blindness is similar to the patient’s death to the ophthalmologists. Moreover, preventing and treating blindness is not just improving patients’ vision but also adds to their daily life. In addition, blindness and visual impairment is the number 1 cause of DALY decreasing in the sensory disorder and the cost will be same as Tuberculosis and HIV/AIDs. The reasons for world blindness is aging, shortage of ophthalmologists, and lack of medical devices. Therefore, as the CEO of the MD founded startup, our vision which prevents and treats world blindness is worthwhile.”

– Eisuke SHIMIZU