This award is granted by the European Society of Retina Specialists (EURETINA), which only awards two prizes per year in Europe. This is the first time that a Spanish researcher has received this distinction, which funds projects with research grants of up to €300,000.
The winning project, entitled, "Prediction of treatment needs using a hybrid Artificial Intelligence-based Management Assistant (ALMA) tool in Neovascular Age-related Macular Degeneration", has been awarded a grant of €240,000. Its main objective is the development of ALMA, a tool based on artificial intelligence to predict the response to intravitreal therapy in patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The project will run for the next two years, from 2025 to 2027.
This study will use the Fight Retinal Blindness Spain (FRB Spain) and FRB Spain IMAGE national databases, created in previous studies coordinated by the Hospital Clínic, which include information on almost 9,000 eyes treated in 60 centres nationwide. With these data, ALMA can be trained to generate accurate clinical predictions based on optical coherence tomography (OCT) images and other clinical data. Once developed, the tool will be validated in a prospective 12-month follow-up study involving multiple centres in Spain.
Doctor Zarranz-Ventura received the award at the EURETINA 2024 General Assembly held in Barcelona from Martin Zinkernagel, General Secretary of EURETINA.
“This recognition highlights the role of the Clínic-IDIBAPS in AMD research, and reinforces our commitment to the use of advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence, to improve the prognosis and treatment of degenerative eye diseases", says Dr. Zarranz-Ventura.
Dr. Zarranz-Ventura received an internal intensification grant as an emerging researcher at the Hospital Clínic in the 2023 call for applications, to be applied during the 2024-2025 period.
