Compared to wet macular degeneration, why are there so few trials for dry AMD?
Much of the research over the past 20 years has focused on wet AMD and the growth of abnormal blood vessels. Wet AMD also benefited from the breakthroughs in cancer therapy where the drugs to treat wet AMD were originally developed to treat the growth of blood vessels into tumors. Plus, we have animal models to test drugs that block the growth of abnormal blood vessels. In contrast, dry AMD is a uniquely human disease and we don’t have animal models to test drugs. Our approach to dry AMD dry AMD is based on our clinical exams, human autopsy studies looking at eyes from patients with AMD, and the genetic breakthroughs that resulted in 2005 once the human chromosomes were sequence. The first complex human genetic disease that was mapped following completion of the human genome project was AMD and it was mapped to genes that are found in the complement pathway, a part of the human immune system. So, in some ways, we can think of AMD as an autoimmune disease in which the disease results fr
