How does angiogenesis impact blindness?

Angiogenesis has a huge impact on preventing blindness. William Li, MD explains which conditions lead to blindness, like diabetes and macular degeneration, and how angiogenesis can prevent or reverse vision loss.

Transcript

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Antiangiogenic treatment for eye disease is about 90% effective. It's unbelievable.

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It's hard to find things in medicine that are that effective.

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One of the areas in which angiogenesis has had the biggest impact is, in fact, in preventing blindness.

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How does that work? It turns out that vision requires crystal-clear passage of light from outside of the eye to the back of the eye

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so the brain can actually process what we're actually seeing. The most common causes of blindness in this country over the age of 65

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is a condition called wet age-related macular degeneration. And under the age of 65, the most common cause of blindness

00:46

is diabetes. Now, both aging and diabetes are on the rise. Our population is getting older, there's

00:55

more diabetes that's being diagnosed every day. What happens in both of these conditions is abnormal angiogenesis.

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In both macular degeneration and diabetes, what happens is that blood vessels that are normally not growing

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are suddenly stimulated to grow. We even know exactly what's causing that growth. It's a protein, a natural fertilizer,

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that's called vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF. And one of the biggest breakthroughs in the field of biotechnology is the development

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of new medications that are called anti-VEGF therapy. So these are targeted therapies that ophthalmologists,

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a special kind of ophthalmologist called a retinal specialist, can give to the eye. They inject it right into the eye, and what it happens

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is it actually prevents this protein from causing blood vessels from leaking as well as growing. Well, it turns out that this treatment, anti-VEGF therapy

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or antiangiogenic treatment for eye disease, is about 90% effective. It's unbelievable.

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It's hard to find things in medicine that are that effective. And in about 30% of people, including people that are legally blind, this type of treatment

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can actually reverse, to some degree, their vision loss. So you can take somebody who's legally blind, who can't drive a car, and after treatment, you can actually

02:15

put them back behind the wheel of a car and get them to lead normal, independent lives. It's really considered miraculous, even