22 hours ago
Hot Off The Press
Check out below to see what new inherited retinal disease (IRD) therapies are in the pipeline.
I have a couple of interesting articles for you this month so read on…
Nutritional Supplementation for IRDs: Preservation or Placebo?
Nutritional supplements have long been recommended to help slow visual loss for those with IRDs, but what is the evidence behind this?
This review looks a bit more closely at the facts, and it seems that there is not very much hard evidence to support their use after all. I have attached the table below if you are interested. Mostly the supplements just haven’t been studied well enough to really know, but my take is that, as always, eating a wide variety of wholefoods and avoiding highly processed foods means that you will get all the nutritional benefits of the expensive supplements, and many more benefits besides.
Source: Retina Today
Usher syndrome is the main genetic cause of combined vision and hearing loss conditions, affecting between one and four per 25,000 people. There are several clinical trials currently underway, including:
- Subretinal delivery of AAVB-081 (AAVantgarde Bio) gene therapy for USH1B patients
- And the LUNA trial currently phase 2b is underway, looking at Sepul Bio, an oligonucleotide, in patients with the USH2A gene.
We can look forward to updates.
That’s all for this time folks…
Who knows what will pop up next? Keep watching this space.
Till next time…
Cathy x
Guest writer – Dr Catherine Civil
My name is Dr Catherine Civil. I have been associated with Retina Australia since the early 2000s. At that time, they were called WARPF, or the WA Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation. WARPF were raffling a car in a shopping centre, and it caught my eye because my dad and my uncle both had Retinitis Pigmentosa. Being a doctor and a parent, I had a particular interest and awareness, not just of the disease, but of the fact that there was a significant risk that I or my children or my relatives might have inherited it.
I turned up at an AGM and found myself on the Board and engaged in fundraising. I spent several years on the Board and met some wonderful people, and I was even Chairman for a couple of years. When I left, I started writing the “Hot off the Press” research update column for the newsletter.
I arrived from the UK in the early 1990s with my husband and twin baby girls to live in Perth for a year for a bit of sunshine and fun, and we find ourselves still having fun in WA 30 years later, and with a grown son as well.
