Luxottica - Royal Parks Half Marathon

Funding by Fight for Sight through the Tommy Salisbury Choroideremia Fund has enabled a British team of researchers to lead the world in starting the first clinical trial for this blinding disease in October 2011.

The trial is being led by Professor Robert MacLaren of the University of Oxford and builds on gene therapy research performed in collaboration with Professor Miguel Seabra at Imperial College London.

Fight for Sight presented Moorfields Eye Hospital with £1m to develop the research unit at the Children's Eye Centre which opened in 2007. The centre is helping Moorfields, together with the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, to establish a world-class research programme in paediatric ophthalmology. 

Fight for Sight funded PhD student Simon Brook who works with Dr Alison Hardcastle. Their research discovered the gene that is implicated in Nance-Horan Syndrome, which causes babies to be born with cataract and other birth defects. 

The charity has helped fund the research into the techniques that have made laser refractive surgery possible. The work of the team at St Thomas' under Professor John Marshall helped develop these techniques and in particular demonstrated how the eyes would respond to the techniques depending upon whether the individual is long sighted, shortsighted or astigmatic. 

In conjunction with the UK Transplant Service in Bristol and the then DHSS, the charity established the UK Corneal Transplant Service, a computerised national distribution service for corneal tissue. This service has vastly improved the availability of corneas for transplantation by facilitating the sharing of tissue between hospitals and by reducing wastage. More than 52,000 corneal transplants have been recorded since the service began.