The 2019 annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) took place in Vancouver from April 28 - May 2. Due to US president Donald Trump’s travel ban on passport holders from several Muslim-majority countries affecting thousands of researchers across the globe, this was the first time this much-lauded international research conference was held outside the US. International abstract submissions outnumbered US ones, and around 10,000 attendees from over 75 countries attended this year’s meeting, which was themed: From bench to bedside and back.
As with all ARVO meetings a spate of new clinical research was presented, most for the first time before being published in clinical journals. Here’s just a few of this year’s highlights:
- US life sciences company Verseon presented promising preclinical efficacy data on a new oral drug candidate for diabetic eye disease. In preclinical models, the new small-molecule plasma kallikrein inhibitor showed good efficacy against two important drivers of diabetic macular oedema (DMO), the kallikrein and VEGF pathways. “What’s most exciting about this, isn’t that it may replace eye injections, but that it could give doctors an opportunity to prevent diabetes patients from developing DMO in the first place,” said Dr Melissa Carlton, Verseon’s ophthalmology programme manager.
- Researchers from the University of Southern California’s Roski Eye Institute presented their research into tear biomarkers for early stage Parkinson’s disease. Initial data showed they may be able to discriminate between PD patients and healthy controls using the protein biomarker alpha-synuclein (α-Syn) in the tear film. If diagnosed early enough, neurological damage from PD may be prevented or minimised.
- Data presented by SightGlass Vision, a medical device company developing spectacle lenses to slow the progression of nearsightedness or myopia in children, showed a trend toward reduction in axial length over two weeks of lens wear, with all three of its lens designs reaching statistical significance in both eyes in an early randomised trial.Designed to modulate contrast in the periphery of the visual field, the lenses were tested on 21 healthy myopic children aged six to 12 years old who were habitual spectacle wearers. “The data clearly demonstrates all three lens designs provided similarly high levels of distance and near visual acuity and contrast sensitivity,” said Jill Woods, clinical research manager and research optometrist at the Centre for Ocular Research & Education (CORE), University of Waterloo, Canada. “The axial length reductions noted were encouraging and I am very excited to see the results of the longer-term study.”
- Stealth BioTherapeutics announced positive results for a new drug for dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON). Focusing on diseases involving mitochondrial dysfunction, the US-based biopharmaceutical company’s data demonstrated significant improvements in visual function following treatment with elamipretide, an investigational drug, in its ReCLAIM study of patients with dry AMD and in the open-label portion of its ReSIGHT study of patients with LHON.
