Your retina builds a fatty acid that almost nothing else in your body makes. It packs that fatty acid into the cells that catch light, and it builds less of it as you get older. That is the whole reason this company exists. How I came to notice it has more to do with rust than with eyes. This page will expand on that, what we made because of it, what its made of and the what the evidence shows.
Key takeaways
- The founder is a PhD biochemist whose doctoral focus was iron regulation, and who came to VLC-PUFAs as one part scientist, one part commercializer.
- The brand is named after ELOVL2, the gatekeeping enzyme in this pathway, whose promoter methylation is one of the strongest known markers of chronological age.
- ELOVL makes vision lipids, a daily softgel that supplies VLC-PUFAs, the very long chain fatty acids the retina concentrates in its photoreceptors.
- Vision lipids supplies the intermediate ELOVL2 has stopped making, so the retina can finish the job itself. The ingredient is named on the label at a disclosed dose rather than hidden in a proprietary blend.
- Piera's partners are working on clinical trials, and the company is dedicated to building validated science around the product.
How I got here
Ever since I was a child I can remember wanting to contribute to the medical field. I come from a large family, with eye doctors on one side and chemists on the other, and my own parents were the chemists. That put the awe of discovery and the need for clinical application next to each other early, so it seemed natural when I chose biochemistry for both my undergraduate and graduate work.
School narrowed it down. My favorite class was mechanisms of drug pathophysiology, a course entirely dedicated to understanding when physiology breaks and why the available interventions work. So when I entered my PhD program I went looking for a subject with plenty of that in it, and I gravitated toward iron biology, because of how broadly it applies. That may not appear related to eye health. It is, and I will get there.
The more I learned, the more I found iron where I did not expect it. Arthritis, diabetes, Alzheimer's. Iron regulation has a hand in all of them, alongside plenty of other things, and once you start looking you keep finding it. From one angle, aging is nothing more than biological rusting.
Why iron? Because the same chemistry that makes it useful makes it dangerous. Moving electrons is what the body keeps iron around, and left unfettered, moving electrons is also how it accelerates oxidative damage. In some circumstances iron drives cell death outright, through a regulated process called ferroptosis.
One of the main hallmarks of ferroptosis is lipid peroxidation, where oxidative stress damages the lipid membranes of organelles and cells until they fail and the cell dies. So studying iron meant studying lipids. Not as a side interest. As the place where the damage actually lands.
Which is eventually how I got to the eye. There is a class of lipid the retina builds for itself and packs into its photoreceptors, the cells that catch light. Very long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. Your body does not pull them out of a meal, it elongates shorter ones on site, and it builds fewer of them as you age.
The first time I read about them I assumed somebody had already done something with this. That is usually what it means when a molecule looks that good and nobody is talking about it.
Nobody had, and the reason turned out to be supply. For most of the history of this field there was nothing to buy. Researchers who wanted to test these molecules in animals had to make them synthetically, because no supply existed to evaluate. Then in April 2025, EPAX, a marine oil manufacturer in Norway, announced the first commercially available VLC-PUFA concentrate. That is the ingredient in our bottle. It is named on the label at a disclosed dose rather than hidden inside a proprietary blend, so you can look it up yourself and check it against anything written here.
Once I understood what these molecules could be, and that they could finally be bought, I had an obligation to take them to market. Biotech commercialization is complicated, and the tech we have is never a perfect reflection of the tech we could have. This was a case where it could be.
That is who I am. One part scientist, one part commercializer. I want to take the best tech to consumers and give them the choice now, instead of waiting twenty years for a maybe.
What is actually in the bottle?
Vision lipids is a 60-count softgel supplying VLC-PUFAs of roughly 24 to 30 carbons alongside EPA and DHA. Each softgel contains 400 mg of EPAX Evolve 05, the named ingredient, in approximately 90 percent triglyceride form as verified on the certificate of analysis. EPAX describes the concentrate as carrying roughly ten times the VLC-PUFA content of raw fish oil. The label directs two softgels daily.
That is the formulation. The evidence around it is the next thing we are building. Our partners are working on clinical trials, and we are dedicated to building validated science around what is in this bottle.
What does the evidence actually show?
Here is the science, stated the way I would state it to another scientist, and why each piece matters.
Start with how little of this molecule there is. VLC-PUFAs make up less than 2 percent of total fatty acids in the whole retina, yet reach 10 mol percent of the phosphatidylcholine in photoreceptor outer segments, roughly a fivefold concentration into the exact compartment where light is caught [1] [2]. Concentrating something that rare, in the one place that does the work, is expensive. Bodies do not do expensive things by accident. That is not accumulation, it is selection.
Now the part that explains what we make. ELOVL2 is the gatekeeping enzyme for very long chain fat synthesis. While ELOVL2 elongates fatty acids from 20 carbons to 24, ELOVL4 takes C24 fats and continues the elongation in photoreceptors, running them out to 32 and 34. This makes ELOVL2 the bottleneck, because ELOVL4 can only work on what ELOVL2 hands it.
And the two halves of that line do not age together. In mouse retina, ELOVL4 and ELOVL5 expression held steady between 5 months and 26 months while ELOVL2 expression fell [5]. The second half of the line is not the half that slowed down.
That is the whole design of vision lipids. Rather than trying to fix an aging enzyme, it supplies what that enzyme has stopped handing over. The retina takes it from there and finishes the job itself.
The experiment that makes this more than a theory is worth sitting with. Researchers injected four different fatty acids into the eyes of aged mice at the same dose. Only the 24-carbon intermediate improved visual function. DHA did nothing. EPA did nothing. Even the finished 32-carbon fatty acid, the end product of the whole pathway, barely moved the needle [5]. Supplying the finished molecule was not the answer. Supplying what feeds it was.
Then they checked whether the retina had actually done the work. After the injection, VLC-PUFA-containing phospholipids in photoreceptor outer segments rose about 25 percent [5]. The tissue took the intermediate and elongated it, which is exactly what the bottleneck argument predicts.
You already know the next objection. Fish oil gets called expensive urine, and the question underneath it is fair: does any of this actually reach the tissue you took it for? Researchers fed aged mice a very long chain oil concentrated from fish oil, and after eight weeks the fatty acids had been incorporated into the eye, with improved electroretinography responses and visual performance [7]. A single dose raised retinal levels of the 24-carbon species within hours. That was oral, not injection, and it was mice.
Behind all of it sits the reason this company carries this name. Methylation at the ELOVL2 promoter rises so predictably with age in human blood that scientists use it as one of the strongest single markers of age itself. The correlation is 0.92, where 1.0 would be perfect prediction. Very little in human biology predicts anything else that closely, and almost nothing does it from a single site in the genome.
Here is what ordinary looks like. A job interview predicts how well someone will actually do the job at a correlation of about 0.2. An hour in a room, and companies make six-figure hiring decisions on it, because it is the best signal available. This is 0.92, off one short stretch of DNA. The gene that gates this pathway is also one of biology's most dependable clocks, and nobody has fully explained why.
Taken together, the preclinical case is strong and consistent across three different experimental approaches. What does not exist yet is a human trial. The stale version of this story is that a molecule this promising sits in the pipeline for a decade, comes out as a drug at drug prices, and most people never see it. We would rather hand you cutting-edge science with its limits stated plainly and let you decide. One trial is enrolling now and others are in planning, and we will publish what they say.
How we talk about the science
One part of this brand deserves a short word, and only a short word. vision lipids is a dietary supplement, not a drug, and we describe it in those terms. We keep our claims inside what the published science supports, we name our ingredient and our dose, and we separate what has been shown from what we are still working to show. If you have a medical condition or take prescription medication, your doctor knows your situation and we do not, so bring those questions to them. Everything else on this site holds to the same standard.
Where should you start reading?
The journal on this site covers the science in plain English, one topic at a time, and there are two places to start depending on what brought you here. If you came wondering about your eyes, start with what your retina builds for itself and why it builds less of it with age. If you came interested in aging, start with the gene that keeps time, which is the one this company is named after. Both are short. From either one, the journal goes deeper, into where VLC-PUFAs sit in the omega-3 family, what actually changes in a healthy aging eye, how EPA and DHA differ and what comes after them, and how to read an omega-3 label.
You do not have to wait for us, and you do not have to take my word for anything. The primary literature is public and much of it is open access. Start with the published work of researchers like Martin-Paul Agbaga, Nicolas Bazan, Paul Bernstein, and Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk, and use the reference list at the bottom of this page as a first foothold. Read it the way I did. The science holds up.
What is coming next?
More of what you see here. The journal articles above are in production. The clinical work with our partners is moving. And vision lipids is the first product from this company, not the last. When something new is ready, this is where you will read about it first. We would rather show up with something finished than tease something that is not.
I did not set out to build an eye supplement. I set out to understand why things break, and this is where that led. What I can promise is that everything on this site will be sourced, and that when the evidence is thin I will say so on the page rather than in the footnotes.
How do you reach us?
Through the contact page on this site. Messages there to reach the team directly and we are fast to respond. If you have a question about the science, the sourcing, or the company, ask it. Straight questions get straight answers.
Cheers,
Steve