Roche and World Sight Day:

Published 07 October 2020

World Sight Day (WSD) is an annual day of awareness to focus global attention on blindness and vision impairment.

This year World Sight Day’s theme of Hope in Sight aims to focus attention on vision health. Globally, in 2020, more than 1 billion people live with a vision impairment that could have been prevented or has yet to be addressed, millions of people live with eye conditions that increase their risk of sight loss and there are vast inequities in the distribution of vision impairment – with increased burden among lower-middle income regions and ethnic minorities.¹

World Sight Day sets a challenge to shift this paradigm. With new approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of ophthalmic conditions being explored as we speak, this is a challenge that we at Roche are committed to and excited to tackle, alongside the ophthalmology community.

Hear more about Roche's unique approach to ophthalmology from CEO Severin Schwan

Roche’s approach to supporting hope

At Roche, we are passionate about saving people’s eyesight from the leading causes of vision loss. We believe that the best chance of uncovering new possibilities in ophthalmology is through collaboration and innovation.

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Collaborating for innovation

We partner with researchers, clinicians and patient groups from the ophthalmology community to ensure we understand the needs of people experiencing vision loss, so we can try to meet them through our approach to innovation, our clinical trial programme and our medicines and technologies in development.

What’s more, our team is built around the experience of ophthalmologists, ophthalmic surgeons and retinal specialists, who bring on-the-ground insights to their work at Roche every day.

At Roche, we are bringing together some of the most talented scientists from a diverse range of disciplines to address some of the biggest challenges in ophthalmology
Sascha Fauser
Global Head of Ophthalmology, Roche pRED
 

We are innovating to improve diagnosis and transform patient experience and outcomes – by understanding the biology of ophthalmic diseases and what this means in practice to people living with vision loss; by exploring new technologies, using artificial intelligence and developing digital health solutions to help better detect and monitor disease progression; and by pioneering new therapeutic options like gene therapy, working to deliver a personalised approach to vision care.

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We believe this is how we can meet the needs of people living with vision loss, by improving diagnosis, eliminating preventable vision loss, and developing better treatments. Incredible progress has been made, but there’s still so much more to do to make this goal a reality.

References

1. World Sight Day. International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. [Internet; cited September 2020] Available from: https://www.iapb.org/advocacy/world-sight-day/

Key links to World Sight Day and IAPB

• World Sight Day 2020: https://www.iapb.org/advocacy/world-sight-day/world-sight-day-2020/
• IAPB: https://www.iapb.org/