ARVO 2024: Deborah Ferrington on the link between mitochondrial maintenance and retinal health
Deborah Ferrington, chief scientific officer at Doheny Eye Institute, details a session she gave on May 9 regarding mitochondria and how they change with health and in the diseased retina.
According to Deborah Ferrington, chief scientific officer at Doheny Eye Institute, the mitochondria plays a vital role in the health of the retina, particularly in patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Ferrington overviews a session on mitochondrial proteins and their influence on AMD progression at the annual Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) meeting.
Video Transcript
Editor’s note - The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hi, my name is Deb Ferrington, and I am the Chief Scientific Officer at Doheny Eye Institute. I'll actually be speaking in a session on Thursday, and the topic of the session is focused on mitochondria and how they change with health and in the diseased retina. Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, and retinal cells are very heavy in energy dependence, and so mitochondrial maintenance is critical in order for the retina to function properly. In my talk, I'm going to discuss results from a protein analysis of the retinal pigment epithelium in human donors with and without age-related macular degeneration. Our work shows that the amount and the quality of the mitochondria are significantly reduced with age-related macular degeneration, which is the number one cause of blindness among the elderly. The dramatic changes that we see in the mitochondrial proteins over the course of AMD progression indicates that this may be a good therapeutical target for treating AMD. So the next step is to dig a little deeper into what proteins are involved to see if there's really specific pathways that we could suggest targeting and perhaps working with some pharmaceutical companies to develop compounds that we could test in our cell culture system.
