Achievements
Here are some of our major achievements in the fight against blindness and eye disease since the charity started in 1965.
A landmark in eye research was made in April 2008 when researchers from the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital announced results from the world’s first clinical trial to test gene therapy treatment.
Doctors have not only proven that the experimental treatment is safe, but it has also improved the sight of one of the three patients involved. Fight for Sight is delighted to have helped fund this important research.
Fight for Sight funded researchers at City University who found that most children only need to wear an eye patch for 3-4 hours a day for up to 12 weeks rather than the traditional treatment of up to 12 hours a day, in some cases for up to two years. Research involved the development of an occlusion dose monitor (“intelligent eye patch”) which measured how long the patch had been worn.
Fight for Sight presented Moorfields Eye Hospital with £1m to develop the research unit at the Children's Eye Centre which opened in 2007. The centre is helping Moorfields, together with the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, to establish a world-class research programme in paediatric ophthalmology.
Fight for Sight funded PhD student Simon Brook who works with Dr Alison Hardcastle. Their research discovered the gene that is implicated in Nance-Horan Syndrome, which causes babies to be born with cataract and other birth defects.
A pupillometer is a device that measures the reactivity of the eyes' pupils. It can be used to diagnose many different types of nerve damage within the eye, including diseases of the optic nerves (that take signals from the eye to the brain), and conditions affecting the muscles within the eye.
The charity funded Dr Fion Bremner at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery to develop and build a customised pupillometer. It is now used for clinical research into a wide range of eye diseases as well as attracting referrals from the whole of the south of England. A major study funded by Fight for Sight started in 2007, investigating the clinical usefulness of pupil measurements in the assessment of optic nerve function.
The charity has helped fund the research into the techniques that have made laser refractive surgery possible. The work of the team at St Thomas' under Professor John Marshall helped develop these techniques and in particular demonstrated how the eyes would respond to the techniques depending upon whether the individual is long sighted, shortsighted or astigmatic.
In conjunction with the UK Transplant Service in Bristol and the then DHSS, the charity established the UK Corneal Transplant Service, a computerised national distribution service for corneal tissue. This service has vastly improved the availability of corneas for transplantation by facilitating the sharing of tissue between hospitals and by reducing wastage. More than 45,000 corneal transplants have been recorded since the service began.
The founder of Fight for Sight, Professor Norman Ashton, discovered that excessive oxygen given to compensate for breathing problems associated with premature birth can cause blindness. His team's observations led to the careful control of oxygen delivery to premature infants and saved the sight of many babies. Subsequent work supported by Fight for Sight has helped to develop techniques to salvage vision in premature babies with sight threatening retinopathy.