Meet Dr. Steve Rose
Steve is highly respected for his expertise and tireless commitment to finding treatments and cures for vision-robbing retinal diseases.
Each of our genes is like an instruction manual. It tells the body how to make the proteins that carry out a specific function. So when a gene is defective, the instructions for that function are missing. Defective genes are the cause of most of the retinal degenerations the Foundation targets. Over the last 40 years, the Foundation has helped to identify almost 200 of those genes, so, as you can imagine, we’re big on genetic testing; find the defective gene, and you can begin to learn how to treat the retinal degeneration. And because genes are shared by families, genetic histories are a must.
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She’s best-known, these days, as “M,” director of the British Secret Service, in the last half-dozen James Bond films. But at 77, actress Judi Dench didn’t earn the title Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire solely for turning the notion of “Bond girl” on its head. In fact, she earned that title back in 1988, after delivering what was already a career-and-a-half’s worth of stage and film performances, in everything from Shakespeare to the musical Cabaret. Since then, she’s worked non-stop, playing, among other notable roles, Queens Elizabeth (Shakespeare in Love) and Victoria (Mrs. Brown) on film and starring in a long-running BBC hit comedy, As Time Goes By.
12 Reasons Why 2012 is Off to a Momentous Start
Feb 16, 2012 12:12 pm - Posted by Steve R.
When I joined the Foundation seven years ago, I was optimistic about the path we were on to find treatments and cures for retinal diseases. There was encouraging news from the research front. We were getting nice results in a variety of lab studies, and clinical trials – studies that involve actual patients — were beginning to appear on our radar screen. In fact, the Foundation’s clinical trial support organization, the National Neurovision Research Institute, had just been formed to move promising preclinical efforts into human studies.
Back in December, during a brief podcast, I got the chance to speak with Tracy Cooley, a blogger at BIO (the Biotechnology Industry Organization), about some of the Foundation’s works-in-progress. Among other efforts, BIO, which has more than 1,100 members worldwide, advocates for those of us trying to improve the health and lives of people with disabilities. Tracy interviewed me after FFB had announced it was committing $8.25 million to six new gene therapy projects.
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You know, it seems like every month there’s a national campaign raising awareness about one important health-related cause or another, and January, as National Eye Care Month, was no exception. Just because it’s ended doesn’t mean we can forget about the importance of eye care, which is at the very heart of the Foundation’s mission to bring an end to retinal degenerations that affect more than 10 million Americans.