Project title: Early stages of age-related macular degeneration: Imaging biomarkers for treatment discovery

Primary Supervisors: Associate Professor Zhichao Wu, Professor Robyn Guymer AM

Email: wu.z@unimelb.edu.au; rh.guymer@unimelb.edu.au

Suitable for: PhD

A major impediment to the discovery of preventative interventions in the early stages of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the need for large and lengthy clinical trials to assess their efficacy. This is due to our current inability to identify those at high risk of progression to target for such trials, and the lack of effective disease biomarkers to act as earlier indicators of treatment efficacy. There is therefore an urgent need for such biomarkers to pave the way for therapeutic innovation to prevent irreversible vision loss.

Modern retinal imaging techniques now provide an unprecedented level of detail about the changes occurring in the early stages of AMD in vivo, providing new opportunities to identify the urgently needed disease biomarkers. Projects are thus available to address this overarching aim, evaluating novel imaging-based biomarkers in the early stages of AMD. These projects can be extended to include analyses of into phenotype-genotype associations, or to take a focus on training AI models to automatically identify key biomarkers for implementation in clinical trials.