Fight for Sight BOSU Study Bursary Awarded

A £6,000 study bursary has been awarded to a team working at the West of England Eye Unit in Exeter and the Wirral University Teaching Hospital in Merseyside.

The bursary, awarded by the British Ophthalmological Surveillance Unit (BOSU) of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists and funded by Fight for Sight, supports ophthalmologists to use the BOSU system - a nationwide surveillance system for rare eye diseases.

Mr Jonathan Park, Mr Balasubramanian Ramasamy, Mr Roland Ling and Mr Som Pradad will use the BOSU surveillance system to establish the number of patients affected by endophthalmitis - a serious and painful infection that can occur following vitrectomy, one of the most common operations for retinal disorders.

Mr Park was delighted he and his colleagues were selected to receive the bursary, he said: “With this generous funding our team can now complete our study relating to this rare but serious problem that can complicate retinal surgery.  The information we hope to gain from this study will be of great interest to retinal surgeons and the 22,000 UK patients who undergo retinal surgery each year”.

For more information
call Louise Elliott at Fight for Sight on 020 7929 7755
or email press@fightforsight.org.uk

Further information about Fight for Sight
Fight for Sight is the UK’s leading charity dedicated to funding world-class research into the prevention and treatment of blindness and eye disease.

We are funding research at leading universities and hospitals throughout the UK. Our major achievements to date include:
• saving the sight of thousands of premature babies through understanding and controlling levels of oxygen delivery;
• restoring sight by establishing the UK Corneal Transplant Service enabling over 48,000 corneal transplants to take place;
• revolutionising the treatment for children with amblyopia (lazy eye);
• bringing hope to children with inherited eye disease by helping to fund the team responsible for the world’s first gene therapy clinical trial; and
• providing £1million for the research unit at the dedicated children’s eye centre at Moorfields Eye Hospital.

Our current research programme is focusing on preventing and treating age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and cataract. We are also funding research into the causes of childhood blindness and a large number of rare eye diseases.