Transcript
Announcer:
This is Eye on Ocular Health on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Steven Yeh, who’s the Stanley M. Truhlsen Junior Chair of Ophthalmology and the Director of Retina and Uveitis at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine. He’ll be discussing emerging innovations in uveitis diagnosis and management. Here’s Dr. Yeh now.
Dr. Yeh:
The intersect between surgical retina and vitreoretinal techniques as well as uveitis, I think, is very exciting. As we think about small gauge technology and a number of different platforms that we have available, there's many ways that we think about improving the type of care that we provide, both from a safety and an efficacy perspective.
We often can combine diagnostic vitrectomy with therapeutic vitrectomy, meaning that we can understand why a patient has an inflammatory eye disease syndrome that can be vision-threatening, but we can also treat their disease. We can clear their vitreous opacity or treat a retinal detachment, and so I think that some of these advances will help from a technical perspective.
But beyond that, from a diagnostic perspective, we also think about the various diagnostics that are available. One of the most promising technologies that I can think about is metagenomics. And this allows us to give an unbiased look, meaning that we don't necessarily know exactly what the pathogen may be that may lead to the uveitis, but we can use unbiased sequencing to detect pathogens that we can't with traditionally used techniques. I think that this really is the next frontier as we think about diagnostic testing for uveitis.
I think within the landscape of uveitis, it really is promising, whether we're talking about diagnostics within the clinic or we're talking about diagnostics within the operating room setting. I think that within the clinic, we're thinking about ocular imaging. The amount of ocular imaging that we have—whether it's optical coherence tomography, fundus autofluorescence, high-speed ICG, or many other—is really profound in terms of our ability to diagnose disease and pattern recognize conditions at a level that we were never able to before. I think that within the clinic, we also have novel drug delivery techniques such as suprachoroidal drug delivery for non-infectious uveitis with triamcinolone acetonide, preservative-free, administered into the suprachoroidal space. And this potential space was not previously accessed as we think about uveitis and retinal disease conditions. As we look forward at other possibilities in terms of both diagnosis and management, I think that we're going to see new techniques from the therapy perspective as well as a drug delivery modality.
The other area that I would really emphasize is that we're entering an era where we're able to move beyond perhaps more non-specific or less specific therapies such as corticosteroids. There's exciting therapies that target interleukin-6 for macular edema due to non-infectious uveitis as well. And so these targeted therapies—or some people will use the term precision medicine—are also an area that I think, within the broader landscape of uveitis, I'm really excited about.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Steven Yeh talking about the future of uveitis care. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Eye on Ocular Health on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
