CRU 2025: The latest and greatest in retina

At CRU Eye Symposium 2025, Rachelle Lin, OD, MS, FAAO, and Quan Đông Nguyễn, MD, MSc, presented a “Retina Roundup” presentation. The meeting was held from March 28-30, 2025 in Napa, California. The duo discussed new and proven treatment options for neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD), geographic atrophy (GA), and diabetic retinopathy (DR). Here, Lin shares a few of her thoughts and takeaways from the discussion.

Video transcript

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

Rachelle Lin, OD, MS, FAAO:

Hi, I'm Dr Rachelle Lin. I'm an optometrist and associate professor at the Southern California College of Optometry at Marshall B. Ketchum University. So we had a great retina updates talk. It was myself as well as Dr [Quan Đông] Nguyễn, who is an ophthalmologist and professor at Stanford University. Some updates from the talk were specifically for diabetic macular edema, treatments for that geographic atrophy and then neovascular AMD. We also went over some new research, as well as an update on the new medication that has been approved for macula telangiectasia type 2, also known as MacTel for short. So with MacTel type 2 and the new treatment that's available, it's very exciting, because this is the first and only treatment available for this condition, and even though most patients with this condition tend to have slight reductions in visual acuity. It's not as serious as some other retinal conditions, if we look at the best corrected visual acuities.

However, it's absolutely debilitating for patients, if it's affecting their central or pericentral vision. So it's something that we definitely want to now be more aware of and make sure that we're referring to our retina surgeons for treatment.

Well, a lot of what I do in low vision rehabilitation is work with patients with AMD, of course, as well as patients with inherited retinal dystrophies. We have our first gene therapy, FDA approved for inherited retinal dystrophy in 2017 and we've really been waiting for new treatments to come out. So any new treatments that can come out for inherited retinal dystrophies, that's going to be really exciting for that community.

I think for optometrists, because there's always so many more new medications coming out for the treatment of diabetic retinopathy and AMD and now a macular telangiectasia, I think we just have to be up to date on what's available and make sure that patients are getting referred for that as soon as possible. With regards to all of those conditions, as well as IRDs, inherited retinal dystrophies, we need to make sure that those patients are also getting those referrals to low vision rehabilitation simultaneously. Because these treatments, most of them, some of them do improve vision, but a lot of them, for example, the ones for geographic atrophy, they're just meant to slow down progression. So these patients, even after treatment, they're still going to have visual impairment. They're still going to have difficulties with their activities of daily living. We want to make sure that even while they're getting this treatment, they're able to successfully and happily live their lives and do the things that they want to do.