An ordinary meeting of the Society took place at the Royal Southampton Yacht Cub on 7th February 2018. The President, Mr Iain Chisholm, was in the chair. The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved. A period of silence was held in memory of Dr G H Foott then the President invited Professor Andrew Lotery, Professor of Ophthalmology in Southampton, to deliver the 2018 Foott Memorial Lecture. Professor Lotery said he felt there was a connection between him and Dr Foott as they were both Irish. He was in the Royal Navy as was Professor Lotery’s father. Before 2002 there was little interest in AMD. There are 50 million people world-wide suffering from it. It has reached epidemic proportions because of increasing age of the population; by the age of 75 one in three will suffer and by 85 one in two. He said his research strategy is to build a DNA library for genetic eye research and they have more than 5000 samples now; to build clinical trials, and he thanked our President for the ‘great' support that he had given him in this; and to embrace new research such as gene therapy and artificial intelligence. Iain Chisholm, he said, was the first ophthalmologist to set up a macular clinic - but at that time there was little to be done. Now there is: over 300 patients a week in this area are being injected with Avastin and they now have a mobile injection suite. The UK now leads the world and the NHS should be proud of this. He then described the case of a patient with resistant central serous retinopathy and how he had tried the selective aldosterone receptor antagonist eplerenone with remarkable benefit. This observation has now become the first multi-centre randomised placebo controlled trial of this therapy involving 22 centres.
Professor Lotery said that searching for genes was important. The finding of the gene involved in Doyne’s Honeycomb Dystrophy has spurred on the search and 19 genes involved in AMD have now been identified. It is considered that AMD is strongly genetic and associated with Complement Factor I overactivation. The future for eye diseases is bright. Gene therapy and DNA editing are happening. The ability to study the retina with Optical Coherence Tomography not only informs of local retinal changes but has the ability to predict disease such as cardiovascular disease and possibly diabetes, hypertension, your smoking status as well as age and gender. Professor Lotery finished by saying that Dr Foott was interested in education - and so was he, he said. Training the next generation of academic ophthalmologists is vital for saving more sight.
After a period of questions the President thanked Professor Lotery for his fascinating lecture. The meeting was closed at 10.05pm.