A Newly Discovered Eye Immune Environment in Age-Related Macular Degeneration

The goal of this project is to explore a newly identified local immune environment in the eye and its potential role in age-related macular degeneration.

A newly discovered local immune environment in the eye offers a path to novel discoveries and treatment targets in age-related macular degeneration. James Walsh, MD, PhD, and his colleagues uncovered this immune environment of the choroid, a supportive layer for the retina at the back of the eye. Features of this immune environment suggest that its normal role is in adaptive immunity, mounting a response against invading pathogens. This reaction also carries the potential to inappropriately damage the eye. These features led the researchers to hypothesize the involvement of choroidal adaptive immunity in age-related macular degeneration and take the first-ever look at potential associations.

For their studies, Dr. Walsh and his colleagues will map how age-related macular degeneration affects this immune environment, using lab models of the disease. They then will flip the study question and examine how changes in this immune environment affect the loss of retinal pigment epithelium, the key tissue that sustains damage in age-related macular degeneration. Their work is novel as a first look at this local immunity in the eye and its potential role in age-related macular degeneration. Uncovering immune targets specific to the eye in this disease could lead to the rapid development of treatments affecting these targets.

While many studies have looked at the innate immune response in macular degeneration, even the presence of the adaptive immune system in the choroid has been up for debate recently. This will be the first study to elucidate how the local adaptive immune system influences macular degeneration phenotype.

This study will be the first to explore the role of the adaptive immune system in macular degeneration, which has been ignored until now. With the recent proliferation of targeted biological therapies that can precisely modulate how the immune system works, knowing how the adaptive immune system works could lead to rapid translation of these therapies to macular degeneration.