ARVO 2024: How mitochondria change with health in the diseased retina

At this year's ARVO meeting, Deborah A. Ferrington, PhD, presented "Genotype-specific differences in mitochondrial function specific to the CFH Y402H risk allele associated with AMD."

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Deborah A. Ferrington, PhD:

Hi, my name is Deb Ferrington, and I am the Chief Scientific Officer at Doheny Eye Institute. I'll actually be speaking in a session on Thursday, and the topic of the session is focused on mitochondria and how they change with health and in the diseased retina. Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, and retinal cells are very heavy in energy dependence, and so mitochondrial maintenance is critical in order for the retina to function properly. In my talk, I'm going to discuss results from a protein analysis of the retinal pigment epithelium in human donors with and without age-related macular degeneration. Our work shows that the amount and the quality of the mitochondria are significantly reduced with age-related macular degeneration, which is the number one cause of blindness among the elderly. The dramatic changes that we see in the mitochondrial proteins over the course of AMD progression indicates that this may be a good therapeutical target for treating AMD. So the next step is to dig a little deeper into what proteins are involved to see if there's really specific pathways that we could suggest targeting and perhaps working with some pharmaceutical companies to develop compounds that we could test in our cell culture system.