Dr. Kal Mentak: Eliminating Preventable Blindness

Dr. Kal Mentak: Eliminating Preventable Blindness

This week we sit down with the Dr. Khalid “Kal” Mentak, a visionary in global eye care innovation. With over 45 technology patents and groundbreaking contributions to cataract surgery and ocular implant technologies, Dr. Mentak’s work has transformed lives worldwide. Now Dr. Mentak is spearheading a global humanitarian effort to eliminate preventable blindness by the year 2050.  Tune in to explore the future of eye care, the challenges of scaling solutions in low-income countries, and how profit and purpose can align to create meaningful global impact.

 

Interview Transcript:

Alan Olsen

This is Alan Olsen, and welcome to America dreams. I’m here today with Dr. Kal Mentak. Welcome to today’s Show.

Dr. Kal Mentak

Alan, thanks for having me

Alan Olsen

so you know we visited several years back, we talked about some of the innovations that you’ve done and your career journey has been absolutely phenomenal. But let’s, let’s do a little walk through the you know, what, what projects you’ve been on in the last 10 years and your your current focus?

Dr. Kal Mentak

Yeah, thanks, Alan. It’s good to be back, and it’s good to see you. You know, it’s amazing how I look back at my career and my, my my life path in general. And I’m, I’m amazed that how when you follow your passion and you follow a purpose. How great things can be. And I’m I was born in Morocco, really a wonderful country, a spirit, deeply spiritual country, where a lot of ethnic groups, a lot of religions, co exist in perfect harmony. I’m the youngest of eight children. My father was a teacher, both professionally and at home, and he always encouraged us to explore the world, and I think he some of the values that I try to communicate to my colleagues, the people I come in contact with, to my family, is that the world is inherently good, and it’s it’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s something that you have to feel deep inside you. And I look back at my career, and I think that’s the thing that stayed constant in my life is that whatever I do, whether consciously or unconsciously, I’m feeling that this is a good world, and that I want to that humanity is good, that people are good. And when I started my grad school, I’m a quantum physicist by education. And I came to Florida to go to grad school. I met my PhD advisor, Dr Eugene Goldberg, and he is a brilliant Nobel Prize caliber scientist, and he had also the same values. He was very kind, very passionate about helping people, and he got me hooked on bio engineering and ophthalmology, and together, we did some pioneering work in how materials interact with ocular tissue. And we invented a lot of things, and some of those things are the things that I used in some of my some of my ventures and some of my startups, and throughout my career, it’s been always the same team. And the theme is that this is a great this is a good world, inherently good world. And whatever talents we have, we can still lead a good life, provide for our families, provide and help the community. But the same time that light, so to speak, shines through that whatever talent we have to help others. So that’s pretty much it’s been my calling, if you want to say that, and it’s been absolutely rewarding. It’s been absolutely wonderful to see how the resonates with people, resonates with employees, resonates with anybody that you come into contact with, professionally and personally.

Alan Olsen

Now you hold over 50 patents, many which have transformed the eye care. Which invention in the world of eye care are you most proud of?

Dr. Kal Mentak

I’m laughing because my wife laughs at me when I tell her my inventions are like my children. It’s very difficult to pick one over the other. But from a global impact perspective, I’d have to say that the materials, the novel materials that we have, I have a family patents on novel materials for ocular implants. And these materials are are now used for to make intraocular lenses for cataract surgery. And there are 10. Of millions of people with these implants in their eyes. They’re sold by companies like Bao Shalom and Santan and other companies, and from a global impact perspective, as you probably know, cataract is the leading cause of blindness in the world, and these materials have made that surgery a lot safer, a lot cost, if a lot more cost effective than used to be before. So from that perspective, I would say that the my contribution to cataract surgery, and some materials used for cataract surgery, is perhaps the most impactful in terms of helping people, in terms of making a contribution to healthcare, global healthcare in general.

Alan Olsen

What would inspire you to move from just being that scientist and inventor to founding and leading companies in ophthalmology?

Dr. Kal Mentak

It was a natural progression. For me, it was a natural evolution, because I was a pure scientist that I saw that innovation is not going to be helpful and helpful for people until you get it to become a product. And you get it, you need to deploy it, you need to bring it to market. And that’s again, this is something that I had to learn through my career, transitioning from being a pure scientist to an entrepreneur, fundraising, building a company around the product. And I actually communicate that to a lot of my portfolio company founders. I tell them the idea the product technology is a very small part of helping the world or building a valuable asset for your shareholders. The real work is, how do you take a product and build a company around it to make it useful for the world? And for me, that was a natural transition, because I believe that to benefit people with whatever talent I have in science, I really, really have to do the other part of getting that product out there, getting approved, approved, as you know, In healthcare and in medical products, with medical devices, you have to go through a clinical trial. So it’s a long process, it’s an expensive process, but it’s a process that is necessary. So I had to learn how to do that through failure, through successful companies as well, and we were able to get these products to market globally, not only in the US, but in Japan, in other parts of the world. And for me, that was a challenging part, but it’s also a fun part to see it really almost like a child. You see how it’s born and how it grows up and how it becomes mature, and how it benefits and and brings value to the world at large. Then

Alan Olsen

you mentioned in in in past conversations, that preventable blindness could triple by the year 2050, why is that?

Dr. Kal Mentak

It’s a staggering burden. It’s a staggering problem. It’s a crisis. And the reason why is especially in low income countries, you know, people who are not as privileged as we are in terms of having access to healthcare, in terms of, you know, going to the doctor whenever you feel something is wrong with you, a lot of countries don’t have that luxury. So if you look at cataract, if you look at diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, all of these things are very prevalent in Africa, very prevalent in Asia, and the speed and the pace at which we are addressing this issue in low income country is not keeping up with the increase of the problems and the increase of people suffering from these these issues so, and this is very relevant to the new initiative that we’re talking about, is that if we keep doing the same things we’re doing today, I mean, there’s a lot of wonderful people out there trying to help, donating money, going to these countries, doing cataract surgeries everywhere, and I was part of Two big organizations that are doing that right now, they’re doing great thing. They’re great people. The problem is that the solution is not effective enough, you know, because it’s a huge challenge. You’ve got about 800 million people in the world suffering from either blindness or some kind of vision. An impairment, and that’s a huge number, and we adding to it every year. We are pure. We’re addressing some of from some of the issues, but just the enormity and the size of the issue needs and requires more creative solutions. And this is really what we’re working on by combining innovation with philanthropy with new financial models. So that’s really the new the new challenge that we have before us is to really address this big issue with innovative solutions

Alan Olsen

now. Now the Vision Innovation Institute is partnering with Andrew Doherty’s vision foundation on the project. How do these two organizations complement each other in practice? Yeah.

Dr. Kal Mentak

So the Foundation was founded by my good friend, Dr Paul Doherty, just an amazing, amazing Surgeon and an amazing human being who’s really passionate about curing blindness globally. And this is a nonprofit foundation, and the vision Innovation Institute is a for profit company that is developing new technologies tailored to low income countries. So the idea is to have is to have these companies work together so that the innovations that the Institute is coming up with and getting products to market through a very talented team. These technologies can be, will be deployed by the Foundation, for the nonprofit foundation, the they we will have infrastructure so you can think of the foundation as a conventional nonprofit organization, very similar to cure blindness or Orbis, but that will have access to innovative products that are tailored specifically for Those countries in terms of costs, in terms of high quality, and in terms of how do we deploy these systems? So that’s really the idea behind combining the two entities.

Alan Olsen

And what are some of the challenges right now in the trying to implement this mission at a global scale for low and middle income countries. And how are you addressing these challenges?

Dr. Kal Mentak

So we’re we see ourselves as startups. This is like a both. Both entities are in startup mode right now. So the challenges are the challenges, first of all, the challenges that you would see with with conventional startups, where you could have to fundraise, you’d have to build a team, you have to build systems around the idea. But if you look at low income countries in general, the challenges they have is that they have very little resources in financial resources and infrastructure, first of all, and one of the biggest challenges, having worked with two of the biggest organizations delivering these kind of eye care systems to these low income countries, is awareness. People are just not aware that they can have access to certain to a certain system of care. And some of these things are challenges from the perspective of building, first of all, grassroot community awareness that people who will have eye care issues. Can have access, first of all, to diagnose, diagnostic tools. They can have access to a community of people who can help them with that issue. So that’s the first challenge. In a lot of these countries, they’re not even aware that there’s help out there. The first thing is to build local capabilities by training local people to address these issues with global support from us. And that’s also somewhat of a new idea that we’re trying to implement, is that to address these challenges, we’re going to address them from with innovative with an innovative approach, and this is one of them, training people on the ground to do the surgeries, training them how to use innovative products. Because a lot of these surges are trained to use outdated diagnostic tools, outdated surgical kits, surgical products. We Our objective is to change that is. To train these people to use the gold standards that we’re using in the US or we’re using in Europe, and do it in a way that allows them to grow their network locally. And in my mind, in my belief, this is the only way to address this big problem. I mean, you can’t really do it remotely. You can’t do it with doing one or two missions or 10 missions a year, because just the scale of the issue is too big.

Alan Olsen

You know. I’m just curious that when you look at the US system of, you know, doing the research and development in the area of healthcare and eye care, the lot of standards, lot of processing. And I don’t, I don’t know if it’s the most efficient I would might my guest from an outsider looking in, is they want to be careful not to make mistakes. But do you find working in the third world countries that the time you can take to get solutions out there is much more efficient.

Dr. Kal Mentak

You know, Alan, it’s interesting that you say that, because there’s really big organization trying to answer that question and see if they can be more efficient in delivering solutions to low income countries. So you’re asking a question that comes up a lot. I mean, the World Health Organization and other and other big organizations are trying to see whether they can take systems that are working in the US or Europe and deliver them in a way that allows them to be more efficient. And I think that’s precisely what we’re talking about here. Is that it extremely challenging to take systems that are working in a country where there are so many other things helping that system, and kind of uproot them and take them to Ethiopia, take them to Ghana, to open to Kenya. What you have to do is start to design and tailor products specifically for those markets, and that’s not only the product, but also the delivery system, the platforms, the way to even communicate with people locally on how to use those systems and how to really leverage them and take advantage of them, not only for short term but for long term sustainability, if you will. And that’s really one of the challenges. I had to learn this the hard way. Again, as I said, I was with two of the biggest NGOs dealing with this issue, and we couldn’t really find a good answer to this question in terms of saying, You know what, I’m going to take a product and I’m going to take a system and I’m going to put it over there, whether it’s a hospital, because it just doesn’t work. I mean, the whole environment is different, and that’s also part of my upbringing, because I grew up in Morocco, which is an African country. So I’m aware of some of these, some of these issues, some of these subtleties that are extremely important in being efficient in those countries.

Alan Olsen

Now you emphasize building purpose driven organizations. What insight can you give to offer investors who want to align profit with purpose?

Dr. Kal Mentak

Yeah, the first thing I would say Alan is that people need to understand that profit and purpose are not mutually exclusive. I think this is something that maybe the way, you know, markets work in developing countries where there’s this over emphasizing of profit, of growth and things like that, you can still do a lot of that, but also have more of a sustainable, purpose driven mission, where you also helping people and yeah, you can see the last, you know, 15 years or so, where there are companies who are doing that. They’re focusing on social, social impact. They’re they’re focusing on making their products better for the consumer. Beyond profit and this success some, a lot of these companies have been extremely successful because they’re building loyalty, they begin trust, and they’re building more of a an idea that, again, this is a good world. You know, you can still build value. You can still realize incredible growth, but the same time, have a purpose driven organization and the culture also has to be built such a way that people believe. Even that it’s not only a facade, it’s more of this. Is really why we doing this, because we want to make this world as a better place for next generation. And I think the last 15 years, we’ve seen that this can be done. There are a lot of companies doing it incredibly well. So I think for any investor who’s interested in realizing profit but also doing some good, this is the opportunity to do it. There are a lot of not only our initiative, but other initiatives that are that that been very successful in in achieving these goals, and this is really our purpose, is to get people to to get this idea to resonate with investors.

Alan Olsen

Do you feel it’s realistic to eliminate an eye disease like glaucoma?

Dr. Kal Mentak

Absolutely. And the reason why I’m saying absolutely is that I’m an optimist. Again. I believe that this is a great world, that people are good, inherently, a lot of things that we thought were almost impossible, even five years ago, we’re now addressing them and addressing them effectively. I think there are things happening in this world, like AI, for instance, no technology has been adopted as fast as AI, and I think that helps us as scientists look at drug discovery is going to explode, because AI is now allowing people to do things that were almost impossible, even a year ago or two years ago. I think eye pathologies, eye diseases in general, are also going to benefit from this explosion of technologies, not only AI. I think Gene therapy, I think better understanding of the anatomy of the eye be helped with a with with things like AI and things like that. I think he’s going to make a lot of these challenges that even two or three years ago look insurmountable. We could look at them and say, You know what? I think we’ve got a good chance now. We’ve got a good shot at this. And I’m, I’m convinced, as a scientist, as a human being, that the world is getting better and better. It doesn’t look that way. But when you look from the outside and look at all the conflicts and look all the issues and suffering. But I think as long as there are people who are purpose driven, trying to do the best they can to help, I think we can defeat glaucoma. We can defeat a lot of diseases that that were almost impossible to to address, even few years ago,

Alan Olsen

For individuals wanting to support the global eyecare initiative, we may go to learn more about your social investment opportunities.

Dr. Kal Mentak

Yeah, we’re still in startup mode right now. We’re building the platforms, and we will make public announcements at the right time, very soon, I am open to and we are having discussions with potential investors. We’re having discussions with and exploring grants with different government agencies to support the initiative. And we plan to share the progress with potential investors. We plan to share how their contributions are making a dent in the blindness issue that we just discussed. So at the right time, we’ll make the announcement. I’m open to talking to potential investors about the next steps and all of that.

Alan Olsen

Dr. Mentak it’s been a pleasure having you with us today, here on American Dreams.

Dr. Kal Mentak

Thank you so much. Alan, thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.