Ten years may not seem like a long time, but in my field, ophthalmology, it has made the difference between going blind and still being able to drive.
Ten years ago, if you developed wet age-related macular degeneration, a disease that wreaks havoc on central vision and limits the ability to read, recognize faces and generally see up close, there wasn't much we could do. If you were lucky and had a specific form of the disease, the best we had to offer was a laser treatment called photodynamic therapy, or PDT. Sadly, it didn't really do enough to help save vision; most people's sight still worsened.
Then some brilliant minds applied principles of cancer therapy to come up with a treatment that could actually improve vision in people with wet AMD. They realized that the two diseases had an important trait in common — they both involved the growth of new blood vessels, whether in tumor cells or in the retina. They used a colon cancer drug that attacks these new blood vessels in tumors to target the similar vessels in wet AMD. I feel lucky to be practicing today and to be able to offer my patients such a game-changing treatment.
Still, it's not without difficulty. The treatment involves injections of medicine into the eye, sometimes on a monthly basis. Lest you run screaming from your computer or smartphone at the mention of eye injections, it sounds quite a bit scarier than it actually is. Of course that's easy for me to say, but when the alternative is going blind, it changes your perspective.
Nonetheless, these injections are a huge burden on patients and their families. Family members often have to take time off work to drive their loved ones to their frequent appointments, or patients may still be working themselves and have to leave work.