Five notes:
1. The clinical trial involves teaching surgeons how to treat patients suffering from wet age-related macular degeneration. The trial is testing the use of a device — “roughly the size of a grain of rice,” according to WSJ — that would be implanted into a patient’s eye to continuously release a drug to treat the disease.
2. More than 150 surgeons have participated in the clinical trial during the past year, which involves the use of VR headsets and technology from software company VRmagic. Using VR and a physical replica of a human eye, surgeons are able to simulate the procedure to treat wet age-related macular degeneration.
3. Anthony Adamis, MD, senior vice president of development innovation at Genentech, told WSJ: “Historically, surgeons had to learn on patients. What we’re trying to do here is see all the possible permutations that can occur, in virtual reality, so that when [the surgeons] are actually doing this on a patient, they’re ready.”
4. If the device in the clinical trial is approved by the FDA, Genentech said it will have to train thousands of retinal specialists in the U.S. how to properly use it. VR will be a major component of that training, according to Dr. Christopher Brittain, interim global head of clinical ophthalmology at Genentech.
“Virtual reality is really going to make sure that every surgeon is as ready as they possibly can be to perform these surgeries,” he told WSJ.
5. Genentech’s inspiration for the VR training program reportedly came from the commercial aviation sector, which uses simulated trainings to teach pilots how to fly.
To read the article in The Wall Street Journal, click here.
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