Part 1: What if? Curing any eye disease with the snap of your finger

In celebration of Ophthalmology Times' 50th anniversary, we asked leading experts in the field, in a perfect world, if they had the ability to cure one eye disease or condition in the snap of their finger, what they would choose and why.

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Andrew G Lee, MD:

The final common endpoint for all optic-neuropathies is optic atrophy. It doesn't matter whether it's ischemic optic-neuropathy or inflammatory optic-neuropathy or compressive optic-neuropathy. So if I could cure something and say, what would I be able to reverse it would be optic-atrophy. If we could make the optic nerve come back to life, and there's a lot of research going on right now to regenerate that optic nerve. In the past, we would have said "it's not possible," but I think stay tuned to this channel. And so if I could reverse one thing, it would be optic-atrophy.

Steven G Ness, MD

PVR would be one of those ones that I would really think about. We don't have any good treatments other than surgery for it now. And as you can imagine, if you have surgery and develop PVR, if you have more surgery, you're highly likely to develop PVR again. So many of these patients are getting 2, 3, 4, surgeries, losing significant vision. We're fortunate that it's not, you know, compared to some of the other conditions we see, like diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration, nowhere near as common, but it is a pretty devastating condition when it happens.

Yasha S Modi, MD:

If there was any eye condition I would cure, I think it would probably be geographic atrophy. You know, when we think about diabetic macular edema, overwhelmingly, patients do quite well. There are outliers. Retinal vein occlusion, again, overwhelmingly quite well with outliers, and AMD in the exudative form, we're excelling, and these TKI programs are going to be a big part of that success story. But geographic atrophy is still really, really hard. Where, you know, when you follow patients longitudinally, it's still awful to see them losing vision despite receiving treatment.