Part 3: 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.

Jay Chhablani, MD:

There is a definite bias, because I do focus on macular diseases. So my first magic wand will try to work on age-related macular degeneration, because this is definitely the biggest burden we have on this side of the world.

David A Eichenbaum, MD, FASRS:

If I could cure any eye condition anywhere in the world today, it would probably be aggressive X-linked inherited retinal dystrophies, on the whole. I think that the visual devastation that you see from those in young people is brutal. If we could just eliminate that entire set of genes for all of those aggressive inherited retinal diseases, I think that would be pretty fantastic and get us decades and decades and decades of good vision per patient.

Jennifer Lim, MD:

If I could pick any disease that I could cure with a magic wand, I would pick retinal degenerations, where these patients are losing vision, and there's really nothing to stop that visual loss. These are really young patients who are impacted by the loss of their peripheral vision and, in a significant proportion, their central vision as well. So I would love to cure all inherited retinal diseases and bring them back to normal so they can live full, active lives.

Matther Starr, MD:

Probably geographic atrophy. I think that's just such an unmet need right now with what we have in terms of treatment. So many patients just want to reverse time and get vision back. We have nothing we can do to do that right now. I think that's probably my magic wand cure.