A Report to the FREDERIC C. HAMILTON FOUNDATION for the Frederic C. Hamilton Macular Diagnostics Center and the Frederic C. Hamilton Age-Related Macular Degeneration Center
The Frederic C. Hamilton Family Foundation is an indispensable partner to the University of Colorado’s Department of Ophthalmology, with significant investments in diagnostic technology and research for age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The Foundation’s support has allowed the Department, led by retina specialist Naresh Mandava, MD, to make substantial improvements for patients. Thanks to the Foundation’s philanthropic investments, much of our AMD research is being scaled nationally and internationally to benefit people living with AMD in Colorado and beyond.
The Frederic C. Hamilton Macular Diagnostics Center was formed in 2015 to provide cutting-edge imaging technology for patients with AMD. The latest innovations include new ocular coherence technology devices (a non-invasive imaging tests to take cross-section pictures of a patient’s retina) as well as high-resolution fundus imaging devices (used to take images of the retina for diagnosing and treating various ocular diseases); these improvements have bolstered our research infrastructure and the clinical care we provide to patients.
We would not be where we are today without the Foundation’s significant investment of $2M to these imaging initiatives. This generous gift paved the way for us to receive high-level federal funding for our AMD research and enabled us to recruit top talent, including our new imaging team, which focuses on applying artificial intelligence to ocular imaging and AMD. The Frederic C. Hamilton AMD Center is thriving today, performing tens of thousands of images each year. It is a critical part of the services that the eye center provides.
In 2016, the Foundation followed its contribution to our AMD diagnostics program with a $5M pledge. This pledge provided flexible funding — the type of support that federal and industry funders will not provide — and allowed us to pursue new avenues of investigation and support early-stage AMD research.
We have used the Foundation’s pledge to nurture some of our most important and promising AMD research involving advanced epidemiological studies. This work is improving our knowledge about the disease, its risk factors, how it progresses, and the best way to prevent and treat its progression. We believe that this research will improve outcomes for patients, particularly by helping them avoid advanced stages of AMD.
Anne Lynch, MD, MSPH, directs our Division of Ophthalmic Epidemiology. Relying on support from the Foundation, Dr. Lynch has developed an extensive registry of biomarkers — clues or signals from a patient that ophthalmologists can use to understand and monitor vision health — allowing her to track the development of AMD. Data are collected from patients with AMD who attend the UCHealth Sue Anschutz-Rodgers Eye Center retina clinics. Our study coordinators collect images of the eye and DNA samples from every patient enrolled in the registry. To date, roughly 1,800 patients have been recruited into the registry and are tracked for follow-up every 12 months.
Dr. Lynch and her colleagues believe their research will help ophthalmologists identify which patients are likely to develop an advanced form of AMD and determine medical or lifestyle interventions. This late stage of AMD is known as geographic atrophy and is characterized by a degradation of the macula and a loss of central vision. Due to the limited treatments available for geographic atrophy, Dr. Lynch and her team are trying to determine if an intervention can be made before a patient develops the condition in the first place.
Through the patient registry, Dr. Lynch has found evidence that certain immune system biomarkers, such as complement, cytokines, chemokines and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, have distinguished patients who progress to the advanced stages of AMD. In the next phase of their work, Dr. Lynch and her team are analyzing the immune system biomarkers alongside other genetic and lifestyle data taken from the patient registry.
This research also has the potential to improve clinical trials for new AMD treatments. The patient registry may allow ophthalmologists to develop better risk profiles; after patients are identified as “high risk” for developing late-stage AMD, they would potentially be candidates for drug trials for new treatments.
Funding for this type of epidemiological research is rare, and the investment from the Foundation provided much-needed flexibility to establish the registry and support Dr. Lynch’s team. The development of the AMD patient registry and its pilot data put Dr. Lynch in a position to receive a major grant award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Eye Institute. This grant will allow for further study of the role of inflammation in AMD. The registry has been a valuable source of data for several research projects; in each publication and presentation, the Foundation is properly recognized.
To date, Dr. Lynch and her team have used the registry data to:
• publish 21 manuscripts on AMD;
• present at 30 international or national ophthalmology meetings and at 11 local meetings; and
• conduct 3 presentations at the recent Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology meeting, receiving awards recognizing their work as a “hot topic”
The progress described here, and the subsequent NIH award and recognition, simply would not have been possible without the generosity from the Frederic C. Hamilton Family Foundation. Thank you for entrusting us with your philanthropic investment. We look forward to providing additional progress updates in the years ahead.