Q&A: Frank Holz shares how innovation showcased at EURETINA brings hope for patients with GA

Frank Holz, MD, FEBO, FARVO, a retina specialist from Bonn, Germany, discusses the EURETINA meeting, highlighting groundbreaking advancements in retinal disease treatments. With a record attendance of over 11,000, the conference showcased innovative approaches like gene therapy and a implant for geographic atrophy. Holz emphasizes the potential of these treatments to improve patients' quality of life by addressing chronic, progressive eye conditions that previously had limited therapeutic options.

Note: The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ophthalmology Times: What value do you think this year's EURETINA meeting has for retina specialists around the world?

Frank Holz, MD, FEBO, FARVO: I'm enthusiastic about the EURETINA meeting this year, which has a record attendance of more than 11,000 attendees. So it's a huge attraction, and it covers all the field of retinal diseases. There are so many highlights, and most exciting and impressive to me, how many pipelines there are for new treatments to avoid blindness. So EURETINA is now a marketplace. There was a meeting on the Wednesday called the EURETINA Innovation Spotlight. There are payers, there are investors, there are biotech, there's big pharma, there's device industry. So it's a really fantastic opportunity to network and bring things forward.

OT: What new developments or innovations discussed at this meeting stuck out to you?

Holz: There actually many compelling new developments, and maybe I wish to highlight gene therapy, which would be a once and done treatment, and we're dealing with chronic, progressive diseases in the elderly, and repetitive treatments, say, every month or every 2 months, it's just a huge burden. So gene therapy holds the potential to do once and done treatment which lasts for a lifetime.

OT: How could treatments, such as gene therapy, meet the needs of patients?

Holz: With geographic atrophy, the advanced form of dry AMD is a huge unmet need. There are so many patients coming up with the demographics and the longevity. We see more and more patients, and there has been, until recently, no treatment to improve anything in terms of their function, their abilities to read, to recognize faces, and so forth. The achievement previously was pharmacological treatment, which slows down the progression, the expansion of the atrophic areas in the retina. But now with this device, implant 2 by 2 millimeters, which for the first time restores visual acuity in those patients who are so advanced that they have lost completely their central portion, their central vision in their retina.

Evolution has brought the retina forward in former species, it was part of the brain. Of course, it's more handy to have movable eye globes and focus on things that you want to see, but the retina is a highly specialized bio computer consisting of millions of neuronal cells with a very delicate architecture. And this is why, for quality of life, if you lose your light sensitive cells, the photoreceptors, as in geographic atrophy, it's really dismal to be affected patients.