Part 4: 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.

Sophie J Bakri, MD:

The most common retinal condition is age-related macular degeneration, and we do have treatments for it, but they're therapies, and they're not cures. So, I would love to be able to cure macular degeneration. The therapies that we have are outstanding. They are improving vision, but they are limited because we are treating patients frequently, and vision is also limited by fibrosis and by atrophy that also occur in macular degeneration. So certainly, long-term therapy would be ideal, but a cure would be even better.

Alan J Franklin, MD, PhD, FASRS:

I've always had kind of a passion for diabetic eye disease. I guess it would be diabetic eye disease or macular degeneration, because those are major public health problems. Certainly inherited retinal disease can be devastating, but as a public health issue, diabetes and macular degeneration are the big ones.

Michael Lai, MD, PhD:

I would choose to cure retinopathy of prematurity because it is a disease that impacts the newborn, and it has the potential to damage a person's vision for their entire lifetime. There was a time when I was a fairly busy pediatric retinal surgeon and did a fair number of surgeries to repair retinal issues related to ROP. Those surgeries are difficult. The cases are often very challenging, and the patients and their families have to deal with very devastating consequences. So if I could wave a magic wand and make all that go away, I would love to do it.

Joao Pedro Marques, MD, MSc, PhD:

Well, I'm biased because I'm into genetics, ophthalmic genetics, so I would definitely choose one of the most debilitating and blinding conditions there is, which is retinitis pigmentosa. I would love to have, like, a gene-agnostic approach; that means having a treatment for all cases of retinitis pigmentosa and not a gene-specific approach.