Action Against AMD (AAAMD) is the research charity founded by leading sight-loss charities (including Macular Society, Sight Scotland Veterans, and Blind Veterans UK) to join efforts in identifying new interventions to stop the progression of AMD as early as possible, before it leads to sight loss.
Around 675,000 people in the UK have late-stage AMD, which is the most common cause of sight loss in the UK and the developed world. AMD progressively impacts the centre of the visual field, ultimately depriving its patients from most everyday tasks like reading, driving, or even recognising faces.
Currently there is no treatment for the majority of AMD patients. In the UK, only 10% of late AMD patients (those with the ‘wet AMD’ subtype) can be treated. There are no approved treatments for the remaining 90% of late-AMD patients. And this is before we factor in those with earlier stages of AMD, estimated to be more than 240 million cases globally.
The availability of high-resolution, micron-level, content-rich, non-invasive ophthalmic imaging data is at the centre of a revolution in eye health care. AAAMD has already worked with HDR UK to establish the INSIGHT Hub (alongside multiple partners) to make secondary care ophthalmic imaging data available. AAAMD is now embarking on a new data aggregation initiative called Foresight – which aims to bring together high-street, community-level ophthalmic data into a standardised and carefully curated database, to be made available for research. This will, for the first time, enable researchers to look for markers of disease progression and stratification using real-world pre-disease/ sub-clinical data.
Wen Hwa Lee, CEO and Chief Scientist at AAAMD said:
“Data is the critical component which will allow researchers from multiple disciplines to collaborate with us in search of novel ways to tackle AMD – our collaborative ethos is fully aligned with the UK Health Data Research Alliance’s spirit and objectives. It is by promoting fair, equitable, and ethical access to data, and maximising how different datasets can be combined through the Alliance, that we can together discover transformative approaches to help existing patients and preventing members of our society from becoming a patient altogether.”
Website: www.actionagainstamd.org Follow us on X: @AgainstAMD Follow us on LinkedIn: Action Against AMD (Age-Related Macular Degeneration)