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Rayner designs and manufactures intraocular lenses and proprietary injection devices for use in cataract surgery. With Sir Harold Ridley, they were pioneers in the field from 1949 when Ridley successfully implanted the first intraocular lens (IOL) at
St Thomas' Hospital St Thomas' Hospital is a large NHS teaching hospital in Central London, England. It is one of the institutions that compose the King's Health Partners, an academic health science centre. Administratively part of the Guy's and St Thomas' NHS ...
, London.


The origin of the company

The story of the Rayner Company begins in 1910, when Mr John Baptiste Reiner and Mr Charles Davis Keeler opened their first optician's shop at No 9, Vere Street, London, England. They registered their company as Reiner & Keeler Ltd on 30 October 1910. Before forming the company, J.B. Reiner had completed an apprenticeship in 'the art of an optician and scientific instrument maker' in 1891 and had gone on to work for E.B. Merrowitz Ltd, a branch of a well-known American optical company. In 1915, during the First World War, the company name was changed to Rayner & Keeler Ltd. This was almost certainly a commercial decision of the time as J. B. Reiner retained his name all his life. The two founding directors separated in 1917 when C. D. Keeler resigned and severed all his interests with the company.


The first intraocular lens and Rayner's association with Ridley

In 1948, Mr Harold Ridley, consultant ophthalmologist at
St Thomas' Hospital St Thomas' Hospital is a large NHS teaching hospital in Central London, England. It is one of the institutions that compose the King's Health Partners, an academic health science centre. Administratively part of the Guy's and St Thomas' NHS ...
and
Moorfields Eye Hospital Moorfields Eye Hospital is a specialist NHS eye hospital in Finsbury in the London Borough of Islington in London, England run by Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Together with the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, which is adjac ...
, London, together with John Pike of Rayner met privately to discuss a new project. Pike, a director of Rayner and their senior optical specialist, had assisted Ridley with several projects, most recently on the development of electronic ophthalmoscopy. Ridley called his new project the artificial lenticulus project and asked Pike for Rayner's help in the design and manufacture of an implantable lens. In David Apple's article from the January 1996 issue of ''Survey of Ophthalmology'', Ridley recalls "... After months of secret thought, I called my friend John Pike, the optical scientist at Rayners of London with whom I had recently worked on electronic ophthalmoscopy. I suggested that we meet in my car after completing our routine duties that day. So it came about that two men sitting in a car in Cavendish Square one evening devised all the principles of a new operation."
Perspex Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) belongs to a group of materials called engineering plastics. It is a transparent thermoplastic. PMMA is also known as acrylic, acrylic glass, as well as by the trade names and brands Crylux, Plexiglas, Acrylite ...
was chosen as the preferred material because of its lightness in weight and good optical properties. Also observations during the war of eye injuries to RAF personnel had shown that Perspex appeared inert within body tissues. Perspex was registered in 1934 by ICI as the trademark for their polymethylmethacrylate acrylic sheet. In the late 1930s, as a result of Britain's rearmament programme, ICI's total production of Perspex was reserved for the aircraft industry and the material was specifically developed for the use of fighter aircraft. The required properties of transparency, strength and resistance to heat demanded a high degree of purity and polymerisation. The postwar commercial development of Perspex had resulted in a quite different material from that of the war years but, to ICI's credit, led by Dr John Holt they again produced the high-quality fighter aircraft Perspex which they called Transpex I. On 29 November 1949, at St Thomas' Hospital, London, Ridley performed the first IOL operation on the eye of a 45-year-old female patient. The operation was conducted in secret, done in two stages with the artificial lens permanently implanted three months later.


Rayner in the United States

In 1952 the first IOL implant was performed in the United States: a Ridley-Rayner lens was implanted at the
Wills Eye Hospital Wills Eye Hospital is a non-profit eye clinic and hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was established in 1832 and is the oldest continually operating eye-care facility in the United States. It is the ophthalmology residency program for Tho ...
in Philadelphia. Surgeons Turgut Hamdi MD and Warren Reese MD implanted a series of these lenses – some with good visual function results (reported in a review by Dr Charles Letocha in the ''Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery'' in 1999). A lens designed by Ridely's pupil Peter Choyce was the first to be approved as "safe and effective" and approved for use in the US by the Food and Drug Administration in 1981. These first FDA-approved lenses, (Choyce Mark VIII and Choyce Mark IX Anterior Chamber lenses) were manufactured by Rayner. The Rayner C-flex injectable IOL is approved since May 2007 by the FDA.


Developments in this century

On 21 April 2009 the prestigious Queen's Award for Enterprise was awarded to Rayner Intraocular Lenses Limited in recognition of sustained international trade in overseas markets. Also in 2009 Rayner celebrated 60 years of continuous manufacturing and sales of intraocular lenses. Rayner is the only British manufacturer of IOLs: all its intraocular lenses were made at its Sackville Road manufacturing facility in Hove, East Sussex until May 2017, when the company moved into a new global HQ and manufacturing facility in Worthing, West Sussex. The new building was named the Ridley Innovation Centre. The plant includes a new generation of manufacturing equipment from companies such as
GB Innomech GB, or Gb may refer to: Places * United Kingdom (ISO 3166-1 code), a sovereign country situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ** Great Britain, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ** Kingdom o ...
to improve process efficiencies and more than double manufacturing capacity. On 2 December 2009 in the
House of Commons The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. ...
, during
Prime Minister's Questions Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs, officially known as Questions to the Prime Minister, while colloquially known as Prime Minister's Question Time) is a constitutional convention in the United Kingdom, currently held as a single session every We ...
, the sixtieth anniversary of the IOL was mentioned (and recorded in Hansard): :Ms
Celia Barlow Celia Anne Barlow (born 28 September 1955) is a British Labour Party politician who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Hove from 2005 to 2010. She also worked as home news editor at the BBC. Early life Barlow was born in Cardiff, Wales, and ...
(
Hove Hove is a seaside resort and one of the two main parts of the city of Brighton and Hove, along with Brighton in East Sussex, England. Originally a "small but ancient fishing village" surrounded by open farmland, it grew rapidly in the 19th ce ...
) (
Lab Lab most often refers to: * Laboratory, a facility to conduct scientific research Lab or LAB may also refer to: Places * Láb, a village near Bratislava in western Slovakia * Lab (river), in north-eastern Kosovo People * ISO 639 code for the an ...
): "Will the Prime Minister join me in marking 60 years since the British surgeon Sir Harold Ridley commissioned my Hove company, Rayner Opticians, to produce the first intraocular lens? Will he also congratulate the company on receiving the Queen's Award for Enterprise on Friday, and on the fact that it still works with charities across the world in restoring sight?" : The Prime Minister: "In my hon. Friend's constituency, there are many excellent companies, and one of them is Rayner. I want to congratulate all those who have contributed to the success of ophthalmic medicine over the past few years. The inventions that have come from Britain are truly wonderful. We should be very proud of our British scientists and engineers, but also very proud of our medical researchers and medical firms." On 1 February 2014 the High Street retail business of Rayner Opticians was bought by Vision Express from JBR1910 Limited.


See also

*
Harold Ridley (ophthalmologist) Sir Nicholas Harold Lloyd Ridley (10 July 1906 – 25 May 2001) was an English ophthalmologist who invented the intraocular lens and pioneered intraocular lens surgery for cataract patients. Early years Nicholas Harold Lloyd Ridley was born in ...
*
Intraocular lens Intraocular lens (IOL) is a lens (optics), lens implanted in the human eye, eye as part of a treatment for cataracts or myopia. If the natural lens is left in the eye, the IOL is known as Phakic intraocular lens, phakic, otherwise it is a pseudop ...
*
David J. Apple David J. Apple (September 14, 1941 – August 18, 2011) was an ophthalmic pathologist who conducted research on the pathology of intraocular lens complications as well as ophthalmic surgery in general. He was a medical historian and biographer of Si ...


References

* Ridley and the Invention of the Intraocular Lens. David J. Apple MD, and John Sims MD SURVEY OF OPHTHALMOLOGY VOLUME 40 • NUMBER 4 • JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1996 * Follow-up of 3 patients with Ridley intraocular lens implantation. Letocha and Pavlin, JCRS – Vol 25, April 1999


External links


Rayner's International website

Rayner's North America website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rayner (Company) Manufacturing companies of the United Kingdom