Gene-Therapy Clinical-Trial Candidate Screening for Ophthalmology enabled by Low-Cost Widefield Fundus Camera

An extremely exciting application of engineering biology is the recent development and advancement of cellular and gene therapy treatments. Here, we are proposing a disruptive monitoring device to significantly reduce and streamline the selection process for clinical trial patients in gene-therapy treatments targeting Ophthalmological applications.

Gene-therapy based Ophthalmic treatments offer significant promise for preventing and reversing blindness in a range of untreatable disorders. This encompasses more common disorders such as Dry Age-Related Macular Disorder and Diabetic Retinopathy (most common old-age and working age causes of blindness in the developed world) to rarer diseases such as Choroideremia.

A key challenge to the realisation of these gene-therapy treatments is identifying suitable clinical-trial patients to collect sufficient data to approve their use. This is the engineering biology challenge our project shall overcome.

Screening for suitable clinical-trial patients is a major challenge. Even in resource-rich developed countries, there is typically insufficient bandwidth of trained Ophthalmic expertise in the healthcare system to enable reliable screening of eye-care. This issue is exacerbated for the selection of clinical-trial patients; selection requires identifying suitable candidates in appropriate time-window and then continuously monitoring their progression.

These approaches present significant limitations which Cambridge Vision Technology shall obviate with this project. We are developing a low-cost imaging device which does not require the expertise of a trained medical professional. Effectively, we are proposing a solution to automate and dramatically reduce the economic cost of the clinical-trial candidate selection process for gene-therapies.

This would provide a key piece of infrastructure and be transformative in enabling the development of a host of gene-therapies for Ophthalmological applications.