Envision Summit 2025: New developments in glaucoma treatment and tailoring them to the patient

At the Envision Summit 2025 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Rachel Simpson, MD, talked about new developments in glaucoma treatment and really how to tailor glaucoma treatment to the patient.

Video Transcript:

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

Rachel Simpson, MD:

Hi, I'm Rachel Simpson. I'm a glaucoma specialist, a vice chair of education, and the residency program director at Moran Eye Center. So today I got to talk about some new developments in glaucoma treatment and really how we tailor glaucoma treatment to the patient. In the last 10 or 15 years, there's been essentially an exponential explosion of ways to treat glaucoma. 20 years ago, we had medication, and then we had traps and tubes, and with the advent of MIGS, all of a sudden, we've seen this explosion of devices and procedures that we can do in this kind of middle of the road glaucoma treatment space. And the problem that we're now facing as glaucoma surgeons is, how do we pick the right procedure for each patient? And that was really the topic of the talk, which is, the devices are there, and what in our diagnostic tool kit is now missing to help us make sure that we're choosing the right procedure for the right patient.

Unfortunately, what I'm going to say is we don't; we don't have the tools that we need right now to do that in a really scientific way. What we ideally would love is to be able to image the outflow tract and see where the obstruction lies, or figure out 24-hour IOP monitoring and see if someone's spiking or if they're going really low. All of these things that we kind of have these ideas about where we want to go with, but they're not really applicable or essentially ready to go out of the box technology. These are all things that need to get developed. But if we start emphasizing that, hey, we have the treatment tools now; what we really need is the diagnostic tools to match the treatment, then we're really going to be changing the way we treat glaucoma.