Eyeworld

3 EW NEWS & OPINION by Ellen Stodola EyeWorld Staff Writer ASCRS Foundation trip addresses glaucoma issue in developing world November 2015 A recent trip to Ethiopia and support from Transcend Medical helped surgeons gain experience with the CyPass Micro-Stent T he ASCRS Foundation re- cently returned from a trip to the Robert Sinskey Eye Institute in Ethiopia, where Sean Ianchulev, MD, MPH, San Francisco, Steven R. Sarkisian Jr., MD, Oklahoma City, and Earl Randy Craven, MD, Bal- timore, helped teach the surgeons there how to screen for and implant the CyPass Micro-Stent (Transcend with conventional glaucoma surger- ies and can be easily taught, ad- opted, and combined with existing cataract missions. Transcend Medical was very generous in its donation, Dr. Ianchulev said. In addition to the stents, money was donated to sup- port training the local doctors and flying in some of the clinicians to train them. "It was really important because they only have 100 oph- thalmologists for a country of 100 million," he said. "It was a very rewarding trip," Dr. Sarkisian said. "The three of us were blown away by how quickly the doctors in Ethiopia picked up the surgery." After just 2 days, it was Medical, Menlo Park, Calif.). Tran- scend Medical donated more than 100 stents to help jump-start a MIGS humanitarian initiative with the ASCRS Foundation in an effort to start closing the treatment gap for glaucoma in the developing world. Planning for the trip began around 9 months ago. "We realized that there were two main things that we wanted to improve—get- ting more medium-sized companies that are developing new technology involved in organized humanitar- ian work earlier in the process and addressing patients' needs in the de- veloping world," Dr. Ianchulev said. "And glaucoma is a big need—right up there with cataracts—and much less is being done in the developing world for glaucoma patients due to lack of treatments that are compat- ible with the reality of those coun- tries." For patients suffering from glaucoma, there's an opportunity to help at the time of cataract sur- gery, but the technology for glauco- ma hasn't been there to enable such combined intervention, Dr. Ianchulev said. "Traditional glaucoma procedures are hard to implement in the developing world because they are invasive and re- quire significant follow-up and have complications that are difficult to manage." The ASCRS Foundation saw the potential of MIGS proce- dures because they don't present some of the challenges associated Drs. Sarkisian, Ianchulev, and Craven, with Drs. Allehone, Zerihum, and Abeba in Ethiopia Dr. Sarkisian at the slit lamp with a patient Dr. Ianchulev at the slit lamp with a patient Dr. Craven in the OR Source (all): Sean Ianchulev, MD continued on page 8

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