Project title: Atrophic age-related macular degeneration: Expediting translation of new therapies to clinical care

Primary Supervisors: Associate Professor Zhichao Wu, Professor Robyn Guymer AM

Email: wu.z@unimelb.edu.au; rh.guymer@unimelb.edu.au

Suitable for: PhD

Patients who develop atrophic complications of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) currently face an inevitable future of progressive central vision loss since no effective treatments are available to prevent or slow the unrelenting degeneration of the retina.

However, this prospect may soon change as new therapies are beginning to show promise for slowing disease progression in atrophic AMD, and several challenges need to be addressed to expedite their translation into clinical care.

These challenges include:

• How can we best demonstrate that new treatments are meaningfully preserving visual function
• How can we better predict the risk of losing central vision, to guide treatment decisions in the future?

Projects are therefore available to address these major challenges based on using data that has been, or is currently being collected, in prospective studies.