How will the UK Vision Research Network help to encourage tomorrow's researchers, today?

Andrew Dick: This is a short, medium, long-term game, and therefore it's all about how do we build vision and clinical scientists and leaders of the future and get the investment into the field, not just of money and being able to do the projects, but of people.

And therefore, one of the areas to really look at is young, early career researchers or PhD students and create an environment in the UK that we can all work together with a, for example, this initiative of a doctoral school. In the network

Marcela Votruba: By its very nature, this is collaborative because obviously there'll be two institutions that will be working together, and the student will therefore have the opportunity to engage in both institutions that are funded for any one particular doctoral award.

And the crucial thing is the scale this requires, because up till now we are fragmented. And in the UK, we have excellent expertise in areas of vision research related to retinal degeneration. But quite frequently, some centres are not able to collaborate actively with other centres as freely as they would like because the funding demands are often very competitive.

So, this network and these studentships will allow fostering of interchange and interdisciplinarity, which will mean that we will probably be able to work faster and at a greater pace.

Encouraging young people to come into the area and then retaining them will likely be the next steps, allowing us to build upon this over the next five, 10, or 15 years.

Why is it important that researchers from different disciplines work together?

Andrew Dick: “It's by working together that we start to have a virtuous network that supports each other in [our] interdisciplinary expertise.

That's why I find it enormously exciting looking forward.”

How do you see the future of the UK Vision Research Network?

Andrew Dick: The idea was to connect the whole of the UK in a network or as dementia have done in their institute type thing that brings in the whole spectrum to show us the power.

That means going from a doctoral school to how we then fund major programs of work between organizations within the network about how that looks, by working in partnership with that. So that would look about how to bring in the translational conduit with industry, et cetera, to be seen as a real powerhouse of developing that collaborative network that then builds the PhD students, builds the program activity of work, which will include early career researchers and development of fellowships. Just like the Dementia Research Institute, and I'm not shy to say bluntly, if we were to look at what would success look like we would be the leading bioscience eye vision research fundamental to translational to clinical science in the world.

Marcela Vortuba: I would also say that the emphasis on success is on several levels. One is around delivering the potential new therapies of the future. And in a way that's probably our biggest priority and our biggest societal need. But the real opportunity here is that this is just the beginning of a UK vision research network that will potentially allow us to grow and apply and get funding through RCUK, for example, which are the medical research councils and the other councils that operate across the landscape.

And build our strengths in the UK to show that we can deliver these treatments because currently a lot of treatments are at a stage where they have just not got enough of a momentum to push them over the line. Because funding is very tight.