The 2025 World Medical Innovation Forum (WMIF) brought together investors, biotech leaders, clinicians, scientists, and government leaders to discuss a wide range of topics at the cutting-edge of healthcare. If you missed it, not to worry – there's plenty of event news and highlights to catch up on.
Here, we'll recap one particular panel: Saving Vision and Treating Ocular Disease. This discussion was moderated by Rishi Singh, MD, the incoming Chair of the Department of Ophthalmology at Mass General Brigham, and featured the following experts:
- Petr Baranov, MD, PhD, Assistant Scientist, Mass Eye and Ear
- Reza Dana, MD, Director, Cornea and Refractive Surgery Service, Mass Eye and Ear
- Erin Kimbrel, PhD, Head of Cell and Gene Therapy Research, Astellas Pharma
- Nazlee Zebardast, MD, Medical Director, Glaucoma Imaging, Mass Eye and Ear
The panelists, which represented a wide range of expertise, reviewed the most transformative developments of the last two decades in ophthalmology and identified barriers to future progress.
We've compiled some of the main takeaways that emerged from the conversation:
1. Innovation has been booming in ophthalmology over the last two decades, truly transforming specialties.
The last two decades have seen the development of new technologies and more refined treatment approaches that have ushered in a new era of care for patients with eye diseases.
For example, there’s been a major shift in patient care for glaucoma, moving from a one-size-fits-all approach to more personalized medicine as researchers get a better idea of how the disease manifests differently in individual patients.
According to Nazlee Zebardast, MD, this shift has been aided by advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), genomics, and big data analytics.
Other developments that have changed the course of eye care include the milestone approval of a gene therapy for a form of inherited blindness (the first procedure in fact performed at Mass Eye and Ear), advancements in microsurgery, the explosion of biologics, and work in limbal stem cell transplantation (also pioneered at Mass Eye and Ear).
2. Even though science has broken through many barriers to address global blindness, obstacles remain in bringing new treatments for eye diseases to light.
Despite the rapid development of new treatments for eye diseases, key obstacles still remain.
Even in cases where the science exists to develop new technologies or therapies, cost can be an prohibitive factor – whether it’s the cost of surgery, navigating the development and regulatory process, or maintaining inventory.
For example, there are 12 million people worldwide who need corneal transplants due to a loss of vision in one or both eyes, but only one out of 70 of those people will receive a transplant due to the high cost of the procedure, explained Reza Dana, MD.
Erin Kimbrel, PhD, added that one challenge with advancing new gene and cell therapies for eye diseases through the translational pipeline is a lack of standardization in the field that leads to challenges in navigating the regulatory process.
One of the lessons she's learned is that it's important to talk with regulators early in the process, as soon as something changes with the treatment they are developing. That can help to smooth out problems down the line.
3. New technologies are accelerating the shift toward more personalized medicine for eye diseases, especially in glaucoma.
Glaucoma, the leading cause of blindness for people over 60, remains a difficult disease to treat, but clinician-scientists such as Zebardast are using genomic data to better understand the different forms of the disease and which genetic subtypes are likely to progress more quickly.
"The problem with glaucoma is it's a complex disease...and in complex diseases the difficulty that we have is bending all the patients into a single category when in reality it's a collection of different phenotypes and different diseases," said Zebardast "That's what we're trying to understand more with the help of these large imaging and genomics data sets."
4. Retinal regeneration may be achievable in 5-10 years, but it’s a complex problem to solve.
Retinal regeneration—the whole or partial replacement of cells in the retina—has the potential to restore vision that has been lost or damaged by diseases such as age-related macular degeneration.
Since humans do not regenerate retinal cells, researchers have been exploring alternative ways to generate these cells in the lab and make them suitable for transplant.
Baranov believes retinal regeneration may be possible over the next five to ten years through cell replacement or ocular transplantation.
For this to become a reality, however, researchers will have to ensure that lab-grown cells survive the transplantation process, integrate with existing cells in the retina and make the necessary connections to restore vision—three significant scientific challenges.
5. Internal support for the development of new therapies is key in current financial landscape
Drug development is a worthwhile cause, but it’s costly and risky, which makes it challenging to get investors on board.
"What we've seen, especially since 2021 when the markets reached a peak and then went down, has been a major pullback from funding higher risk technologies," said Dana.
Given the tough financial environment, internal funding [from institutions such as Mass General Brigham] can be really helpful in getting new treatments from preclinical proof of concept work to investigational new drug (IND)-enabling studies, Dana added.
"Then we just have to weather this current environment and hopefully wait for better years to come."
6. Balancing Safety and Innovation Remains a Critical Focus
The panelists also shared their thoughts on balancing patient safety with the need for new treatments.
"I think there are going to be a lot of failures," said Baranov. "So in terms of safety, I would say we shouldn't be afraid of a failure, but we have to be very transparent about the data that we collect."
"From a safety perspective, it's important to understand your patient population," Kimbrel said. "Depending on what indication you're in, they may be less tolerant of certain types of therapies. And so you need to understand what those risks are for your patient population."
"And then lastly, I think for both cell and gene therapy, it's the quality of the manufacturing and making sure you have really sensitive assays built around safety aspects of the assets that you're developing," Kimbrel added.
7. Approval processes for new therapies are dynamic, not static (and that’s a good thing).
Recently, some therapies in the field have been approved not because they changed vision or healed eye diseases completely, but because they changed structural biomarkers that are indicators of corneal health.
The panelists seemed to view this transition as a positive one, even though vision remains the most meaningful outcome to patients with eye diseases.
The length of approval studies has also been changing and may continue to change.
As Zebardast noted, it can be difficult to determine how long to study patients for safety, especially in diseases like glaucoma that can progress slowly.
8. Collaboration is key
Participants agreed that one key to tackling the challenges of treating patients with eye diseases, lowering the costs of treatment and ensuring patient safety is through collaboration.
"I think it's critical to have interdisciplinary education in academic centers," said Zebardast. "Having clinicians that can speak the language of data science that can speak the language of public health or genomics or other factors that allows us to ask those clinically important questions but also bring it into a translational reality."
Specialists’ Holy Grails
Finally, in the true spirit of WMIF, each panelist offered a snapshot of the next-generation innovations that they expect to have the biggest impact on patients:
- Zebardast: The ability to risk-stratify patients to offer more personalized treatments.
- Kimbrel: Getting to clinical proof-of-concept with pluripotent stem cell-based therapy.
- Dana: Being able to reestablish homeostasis in the cornea, retina, and other tissues.
- Baranov: Switching to in-process quality controls for cell therapy.
If you enjoyed this recap and want to learn more, click here to watch/listen to the full conversation. We look forward to seeing you at WMIF 2026!
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