Envision Summit 2025: Understanding hyperglycemia in diabetic retinopathy

At the Envision Summit 2025 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Kelly Donovan, MD, talked about her graduate research on the earliest phase of diabetic retinopathy, and trying to understand how hyperglycemia translates into disease.

Video Transcript:

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

Kelly Donovan, MD:

Hi, I'm Kelly Donovan. I'm a senior ophthalmology resident at Duke Eye Center, and I'll be a medical retina fellow this coming year. Today, at the Envision conference, I spoke about some of my graduate research. We were looking at the earliest phase of diabetic retinopathy, and trying to understand how hyperglycemia translates into disease. And we were looking at how hyperglycemia directly up regulates ophthalmology's favorite molecule, vascular endothelial growth factor A, or VEGF A. Which is exciting, because if we're able to understand how this happens, then it gives us the opportunity to intervene earlier in disease, and like many other diseases in the body, diabetic retinopathy is very multifactorial, and in my opinion, treatment of one target is probably not enough, and like cancer, we have to take a multipronged approach in order to have really significant efficacy to benefit patients. But right now that's limited, because we don't yet understand disease, and so more research will be necessary in the future to help us move towards that goal.