Medical devices & diagnostics · Dry eye

AesculaTech

A Los Angeles materials company whose cold liquid sets into a custom plug inside the tear duct. The pilot readout was strong, the FDA file is still empty, and the company has quietly repositioned around partnering.

Reverse chocolate

Chocolate is solid until you warm it, and then it runs. AesculaTech built a material that does the opposite. Cold, it pours. Warm it toward body temperature and it thickens into a gel, then sets into a soft solid shaped by whatever it set inside.

Niki Bayat called it reverse chocolate in 2018, and the phrase stuck to the company.

The place AesculaTech wants to put it is the punctum, the drain at the inner corner of the eyelid. A clinician presses one button on a sterile, disposable, prefilled micro volume autoinjector. A few microliters of cold liquid go into the canaliculus, body heat does the rest, and the plug forms against that patient’s own anatomy. Tears stay on the eye instead of draining away. Two plugs go in under three minutes, the company says, and the injector cap doubles as a dilator.

To remove it, a clinician flushes the punctum with room temperature saline. The plug softens, releases, and leaves through the nasolacrimal system.

The problem it is aimed at

Punctal occlusion is old, and the complaints are consistent. The company’s own NIH grant abstract puts them bluntly: punctal plugs “offer rapid symptom relief but are prone to sizing issues, patient discomfort, and in some cases the need for surgical removal.” They come in sizes, so someone has to guess. They migrate. They fall out. Patients feel them. The alternatives are not much better: prescription drops take weeks to work and can sting, lubricants last minutes.

How many people this affects depends on which AesculaTech document you read. The NIH abstract says more than 16 million diagnosed Americans, the website says 23 million, the Y Combinator profile says more than 25 million, a 2019 trade interview said over 64 million, and a 2018 university interview said 150 million have symptoms. The direction is clear. The numbers are not.

Two chemical engineers

Bayat and Andrew Bartynski met in 2012 as graduate students in chemical engineering at the University of Southern California. AesculaTech was spun out of the labs of Mark Thompson, Bayat’s doctoral adviser and a co-inventor of the phosphorescent OLEDs now in most phone screens, and Mark Humayun, who developed the Argus II artificial retina.

The reason was personal. “One day I was talking to my dad and I heard from him that he’d been diagnosed with glaucoma, but because he’d had heart surgery, he couldn’t have another one,” Bayat told TechCrunch in 2018. She had watched him miss doses of the drops meant to hold the disease off.

The company was filed in California on August 5, 2016. Bartynski was the founding chief executive, and a 2021 SEC exhibit filed by a later employer still describes him that way. Bayat was chief science officer then and is chief executive now. AesculaTech went through the Texas Medical Center accelerator and then Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 batch, and that June MIT Technology Review named Bayat to its 35 Innovators Under 35 list.

The pilot, and the clock

In June 2021 the team met the FDA’s device center. “The FDA confirmed that Humidifeye is a 510(k) device and a predicate was established.” That is the cheaper of the two device routes.

The first human study ran outside the United States, at one cornea clinic in Guadalajara, Mexico. It was registered as NCT05748951 and started March 7, 2023.

On August 30, 2023 the company posted that the pilot was done: 22 patients, three months, results it called concrete and statistically significant. “Data will be made public over the coming months, but a quick summary is provided below,” the post said. Three weeks later the National Eye Institute awarded a Fast Track SBIR. In November, Bayat took second place in the Winning Pitch Challenge at Eyecelerator during the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting, and the company presented at the Ophthalmology Innovation Summit, saying it was moving toward clearance in 2024.

Then the news stopped. The last post on the company news page is dated November 20, 2023.

What happened next was a rewrite

In March 2025 AesculaTech rewrote its About page. Humidifeye is still there, still labeled investigational, but the emphasis moved to the material itself and to sealants, skincare, coatings and composites. “AesculaTech actively partners with industry leaders,” the page now says. The product page reads like a licensor’s sheet rather than a device launch: patented, tested, ready for partners.

The company has not gone quiet where it is harder to fake. A patent application naming Bayat as inventor was filed on September 29, 2025 and published on January 29, 2026, covering a device for controlled injection across a variety of material properties. Two more published in December 2025. California’s registry showed the corporation active and in good standing when last extracted on March 25, 2026.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the chemistry is real, protected, and still being extended, and a small first in human study produced numbers the company was glad to quote. What is missing is everything that would let an outsider check them. No registry result, no paper, no FDA submission, no press since November 2023, and two 2023 releases that disagree about the pilot.

What to watch

• A 510(k) submission. The pathway and predicate have been settled since 2021, so a filing is the single event that changes the picture.
• Results posted to NCT05748951, or a paper on the pilot. Either would settle which set of 2023 numbers is right.
• What followed the NEI SBIR, whose project period ended February 28, 2026.
• A named licensing or development partner. The March 2025 rewrite points at that model and none has been announced.
• Whether Humidifeye stays the lead product or becomes a proof point for the platform.

In their words

AesculaTech funding profile on HVCFHealthcare Venture Capital Fund

Related companies

• Zeta Surgical: Also in Medical Devices. A computer vision system that keeps a brain target locked while the patient moves, so guided procedures can happen outside the operating room
• inSoma Bio: Also in Medical Devices. A liquid protein that sets into a scaffold at body temperature, injected together with a patient’s own liposuctioned fat
• VenoStent: Also in Medical Devices. A bioabsorbable polymer sleeve that a surgeon slips over a newly built dialysis fistula and leaves behind to dissolve
• Illuminant Surgical: Also in Medical Devices. A projector on a boom arm that paints a patient’s scan onto their own skin while the surgeon works

Sources

1. Public recordClinicalTrials.gov NCT05748951Sponsor AesculaTech, Inc. · updated Jul 30, 2024
2. Public recordNIH RePORTER R44EY034758, Humidifeye Plug for Dry Eye DiseaseNational Eye Institute · FY2023 and FY2025
3. Public recordopenFDA 510(k), registration and listing, and UDI queriesFDA · Sep 22, 2026
4. Public recordSEC EDGAR company and full text search for AesculaTechSEC · Sep 22, 2026
5. Public recordNeuroBo Pharmaceuticals Form 8-K, exhibit 99.1SEC · Mar 5, 2021
6. Public recordUS 11,400,044 B2 and five AesculaTech applicationsUSPTO · 2022 to Jan 29, 2026
7. Public recordCalifornia business registry, Aesculatech, Inc., document 3932999Extracted Mar 25, 2026
8. IndependentBiomedical startup AesculaTech is creating a new drug delivery systemTechCrunch, Catherine Shu · Mar 19, 2018
9. IndependentPersonalized occlusion medical device targets DED treatmentGlance by Eyes On Eyecare · Nov 2, 2023
10. InterviewAesculaTech: Reverse Chocolate for Dry EyeMedTech Strategist · Jul 23, 2019
11. IndependentA Better WayUSC Viterbi · Nov 4, 2016
12. IndependentEyecelerator at AAO 2023 finalists and placingsThe Winning Pitch Challenge · Nov 2023
13. CompanyAesculaTech to Showcase HUMIDIFEYE at OIS XIIIEIN Presswire · Nov 20, 2023
14. CompanyAesculaTech news posts, June 10, 2021 to Sep 30, 2023aesculatech.com
15. CompanyAesculaTech website pagesaesculatech.com · Jun 2024 and Mar 12, 2025