The Pathogenesis of Neovascular Age-Related Macular Degeneration and its Immune-Based Therapies
The eyes are the photosensitive organs responsible for vision, receiving light through the cornea, then the light is focused by the lens on the retina, which contains specialized cells responsible for photoreception, encoding various patterns of the image to be transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve (Gartner et al., 2015). The fovea is the specialized regions of the retina which is responsible for discrimination of details and colored vision, accounting for the extremely precise visual acuity, it’s found at the central part of the macula, and composed entirely of cone cells (Gartner et al., 2015).
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Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is one of the leading causes of irreversible central vision loss in elderly individuals, further affecting their ability to do everyday tasks, from reading to even recognizing faces, and thus the need for comprehensional understanding of the disease is important for the discovery of treatments that can help in maintaining their visual acuity, studies have shown that a lots of factors play a role in the disease’s pathogenesis from the structural changes and cellular dysfunction seen in aging, the role of inflammatory mediators especially the role of polymorphic complement H factor (CFH) gene to some controversial finding of the macrophages role in the disease progression, studies have come so far where immune-based therapies by using monoclonal antibodies against vascular endothelial growth factors (VEGF) which play a significant role in the disease’s pathogenesis, with promising finding in the majority of patients.
