• Swindon & Wiltshire Tech
• Wednesday October 14 2026

Med-tech firm wins £8.4m to bring quantum eye scans closer to NHS patients

Bristol med-tech start-up Siloton has secured an £8.4 million contract to accelerate the development of a handheld eye scanner that could bring advanced retinal imaging into clinics, communities and patients’ homes.

The two-year contract, awarded by Innovate UK through its Contracts for Innovation: Quantum Missions Primer programme, will support the design and clinical trials of Siloton’s GiraffeOCT system.

The company believes the funding could cut up to two years from its development timeline.

GiraffeOCT uses optical coherence tomography (OCT) to create detailed images of the inside of the eye, helping clinicians detect and monitor retinal diseases.

Unlike conventional hospital-based machines, Siloton’s device is designed as a portable, binocular-style system, compressing components normally found on a tabletop onto a chip smaller than a £1 coin.

The contract will fund both in-clinic and at-home versions of the technology.

Clinical trials will be carried out with Sunderland Specialist Eye Hospital, giving patients across the North East and North Cumbria access to the system during development, while York Health Economics Consortium will use the resulting data to refine estimates of potential NHS savings.

Alasdair Price, chief executive of Siloton, said: “Winning this Innovate UK contract allows us to accelerate the development of our systems, explore manufacturing and assembly in the UK, and help a groundbreaking new technology be adopted by the NHS more quickly.

“Many early-stage companies struggle to get beyond the well-known ‘valley of death’ in developing new products – particularly in healthcare – but this will support us through that crucial phase, bringing the Siloton system closer to being in patients’ hands and building a technology that can be used worldwide.”

The project is expected to create high-skilled roles in photonics, electronics, software development and manufacturing, with Siloton’s team due to grow to 16 by August 2028. The company also plans to raise further investment to support its second-generation CheetahOCT device, designed to detect a broader range of retinal conditions.

The win comes as the NHS faces mounting pressure in eye care. Ophthalmology is England’s busiest outpatient specialty, with around nine million attendances in 2023/24, while nearly 623,000 people were waiting for an appointment at the end of July 2026 – 8.7 per cent of all NHS waits.

Price added: “The NHS needs new technologies and new ways of working, and it needs them quickly. This contract is a first step toward streamlining the process and ensuring patients in the UK get access to the same innovations as other countries, as soon as they are deployed rather than years after approval.”

The agreement also supports the Government’s National Quantum Strategy, which aims for NHS trusts to benefit from quantum sensing-enabled solutions by 2030.