Josie Robson

Tommy Salisbury is the inspiration behind the Family Fund set up by his Mum, Emma when Tommy was just five years old. Tommy is now 23 and the Fund is celebrating raising over £700,000 on behalf of Fight For Sight and shows no sign of slowing down. Nor does Tommy, who is about to embark on his second London Landmarks Half Marathon and his second London Marathon – all continuing to raise funds for potentially sight-saving research.

While it’s often said that the eyes are the windows to the soul, we’ve known for years that they provide much more than a mere glimpse into our emotional state. The eyes are, in fact, crucial gateways to discovering diseases lurking dormant within our body. For scientists at the vanguard of this work, like Dr Siegfried Wagner, that window is only going to get bigger. We spoke to him about the trajectory of his career and his enthusiasm for ‘oculomics’, the study of the association between changes in the eye and changes to overall health.

Emma Salisbury is one of the powerhouses behind The Tommy Salisbury Choroideremia Fund, raising money and awareness about Choroideremia. This inherited condition has impacted her family over generations, most recently for her son, Tommy. As the Family Fund hits a whopping milestone of raising £714,000 for Fight for Sight towards eye research, we caught up with Emma to see what drives her.

You may have heard of Our Future Health, a study that’s aiming to recruit up to five million people to develop new ways to prevent, detect and treat diseases. Fight for Sight is proud to be an affiliate of Our Future Health, meaning volunteer data can be used to help researchers develop a new understanding of eye diseases within our population. Steven Smith, a Grants manager at Fight for Sight, has decided to take part in the study. Although only the start of the journey, he shared his experiences of being involved so far…

Today is World Retina Day. Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) is a group of disorders that produce a gradual loss of vision. It affects approximately one in 5000 worldwide. Learn about it in four minutes with our quick guide.

Maintaining and safeguarding eye health is something we should all do, but we’re also calling for more funding for sight-saving research. We explore five key statistics that reveal the scale of the underfunding and the economic impacts.