Request for Letters of Intent: Diabetic Retinopathy Biomarker Discovery and Validation

Request for Letters of Intent: Diabetic Retinopathy Biomarker Discovery and Validation LOI Submission Deadline: .June 20th 2014 JDRF is committed to facilitating the translation of pre-clinical discovery of promising targets or therapeutics in diabetic retinopathy to the patient with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). To this end, JDRF is soliciting letters of intent for research to identify and validate predictive and prognostic biomarkers for diabetic retinopathy (DR). Diabetic retinopathy is a sight-threatening complication of diabetes and the largest cause of blindness in the US. Despite recent advances in the treatment of diabetic macular edema, there remains a large unmet clinical need to prevent or reverse vision loss via the treatment of earlier stages of disease, such as non-proliferative diabetic retinopathy (NPDR). Progression of NPDR to vision-threatening consequences can be slow creating a challenge in the design of clinical trials to treat disease at the earliest possible stage. The refore novel biomarkers are needed to identify NPDR patients that are at highest risk for progression to more severe disease. In addition, to increase information that can be gained from clinical trials, shorter-term biomarkers are needed which may predict treatment response as surrogates to endpoints currently accepted by regulators, such as differences in visual acuity or 3-step progression on the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) scale. OBJECTIVES Lett...
Source: ScanGrants feed - Category: Research Authors: Source Type: funding