EURETINA 2024: The importance of the international retina community

Carl Awh, MD, FASRS, spoke about the presence of members of the American Society of Retina Specialists (ASRS) attending the EURETINA meeting and the value of the international community of retina clinicians connecting at meetings around the globe. The interview took place at the EURETINA 2024 meeting held in Barcelona, Spain, on September 19-22, 2024.

Video Transcript:

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

Carl Awh, MD, FASRS: I'm Carl Awh. I'm a retina specialist with Tennessee Retina in Nashville, Tennessee. ASRS has lots of international members. We love to be part of EURETINA, really one of the largest retina meetings in the world, and many of our members are members of both, so your retina and ASRS. We love to have a subset of our membership who come here, share thoughts with you know, our colleagues in Europe; [it's] probably more that we enjoy being here to learn from them.

There's so much that's always new in retina. I think, probably the things that are going to impact our patients most immediately are more durable treatments for retinal diseases like neovascular AMD, diabetic macular edema. We see these treatments actually available now, like the port delivery system that actually gives very durable, long treatments that's been FDA approved, soon to be approved, probably, here in the EU. So that's something immediately available. There are other drugs on the horizon. Barry Kuppermann gave a great presentation about that, which I think will also have these benefits of sustained suppression of VEGF, possibly without the need for surgery, but that's a little further down the road. Durability is one of the major needs, because we have treatments that are effective, but they have to be administered, in the case of intravitreal injections quite frequently.

There's also the issue of whether the more pulsatile nature of drug levels in the eye when we give injections isn't optimal. So definitely for quality of life, we want fewer treatments. For best patient outcomes, if that can be done, we have a method that has a more level amount of drug in the eye. That might be better when we see that coming.

I love the energy of EURETINA. Earlier today, I was in a session really kind of run by, devoted to young retina specialists, and this room was packed-hundreds of people. So to me, that was just great to understand how much energy and enthusiasm there is that's going to maintain our society. For me at these meetings, one of the things I always love with surgical sessions, even if it's not talking about a new technology, just to see great surgeons very eloquently describe how they handle difficult cases, is always lots of fun for me, and they do that so well.

I think actually, I was pretty lucky. The advice I give would be to any young doctors to make sure you use the resources of more experienced people. I was very fortunate in having people really generous with their energy and their wisdom. And I think maybe young doctors don't always realize how many people want to play that role, and how many ways there are for them to reach out for help and to get engaged, whether it's clinical things and research things and business opportunities, all those things are there. And you can do it on your own, but it's way easier if you have someone who's done it already [to] give you some guidance.