Listen closely because you will be quizzed later.
Just kidding! I hope I didn’t scare you! I’m just excited to give you a science lesson here and I wanted to be sure you were paying attention. As Focus on Your Vision will offer plenty of practical steps for preserving your visions, from time to time I want to explain the science behind it. Understanding that is key to a better understanding of your own health.
So my first lesson is about something I’m very passionate about and something on which my company Acucela is focused – Visual Cycle Modulation or VCM. My team and I have been working on leveraging VCM to develop treatments that could help tens of millions of people suffering from blinding eye diseases worldwide.
Allow me to first break down the visual cycle part first, which is the biological conversion of a photon into an electrical signal in the retina, which comprises light-receptor cells known as rods (how you get your night vision) and cones (how you get your day vision).
You may not know it, but cone cells, which allow the perception of color, have a critical role in detailed vision and central vision.. Rod cells are more numerous, ultrasensitive to light and support our cone cells, giving us our vision.
As we age, more rod cells are lost than cone cells and diseases like age-related macular degeneration can result. However through the practice of VCM, we believe we can reduce the activity of the rod visual system, slowing it down to protect the retina from retina from light damage, improve the arrangement of blood vessels and reduce the accumulation of retinal-related toxic by-products.
The VCM compounds we’re developing will be able to be delivered as an oral treatment, rather than by injection into the eye, which is more common in current eye therapy. Doctors, scientists and biotech companies are working to bring this type of compound to patients because we think it will change the way age-related eye diseases are treated forever.
What do you think? Leave me your questions in the comment field and I will be happy to answer them, hopefully providing more insight into how VCM works.
