ARVO 2023: Human donor tissue to identify mechanism of retinal pigment epithelium death

Deborah Ferrington, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Doheny Eye Institute, shares a brief overview of her presentation on identifying the mechanism responsible for the death of the retinal pigment epithelium, which she presented during the 2023 Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) meeting in New Orleans.

Editor's note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Deborah Ferrington, PhD:

Good afternoon. My name is Deborah Ferrington, and I'm the Chief Scientific Officer at Doheny Eye Institute. I'm here at the ARVO meeting in New Orleans.

I gave a talk this morning on the cell death group. And what I talked about was our work using human donor tissue to identify the mechanism responsible for the death of the retinal pigment epithelium.

The group that we looked at were donors that had the complement factor, high risk allele that is associated with AMD. We compared their results with donors that have the low risk allele.

What we found is that donors with high risk for AMD, they had lower mitochondrial function and this lower mitochondrial function could be one of the things that tips the balance between a healthy donor's RPE and those that go into age-related macular degeneration.