Second UCLA/American Uveitis Society International Workshop on Objective Measures of Intraocular Inflammation for Use in Clinical Trials

Second UCLA/American Uveitis Society International Workshop on Objective Measures of Intraocular Inflammation for Use in Clinical Trials is organized by Medical Conference Planners International (MCPI) and will be held from Sep 27 - 28, 2024 at UCLA Stein Eye Institute, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.

Description:
This meeting will provide a 5-year follow-up to the highly successful 2019 AUS UCLA Workshop that focused on how best to obtain objective, reproducible, and clinically relevant data for use as outcome measures in clinical trials dealing with uveitis. This workshop is again intended for ophthalmologists who participate in clinical research dealing with inflammatory eye diseases (uveitis specialists, retina specialists, pediatric ophthalmologists); clinical trialists; and pharmaceutical and device industry representatives.

Objective measures are needed as an alternative to the subjective nature of clinical assessments and the imprecision of categorical data, which may result in failure to achieve study endpoints in clinical trials. Objective measures have been sought for each of the five signs of intraocular inflammation that were proposed for use in studies dealing with uveitis at the March 2015 NEI / FDA Workshop on Clinical Trial Endpoints for Inflammatory Eye Diseases: anterior chamber cells; vitreous inflammatory reactions, retinal vascular leakage, retinal infiltrates, and choroidal infiltrates. In addition, aqueous humor protein level (“flare”) may eventually be incorporated into studies of anterior uveitis.

Many isolated studies have investigated the ability of devices to measure features of intraocular inflammation; however, before objective measures can be used in clinical trials, a number of issues must be addressed, including appropriate devices for, and technical aspects of, data collection; how results will be quantified; interpretation of results; confounders; reliability and reproducibility of measurements; and validation against definitive outcome measures, such as retention of vision and lack of structural complications. The 2019 Workshop began discussions about how to achieve the overarching goal of incorporating objective measures of intraocular inflammation into clinical trials.

The goals of the 2024 Workshop are the following:
• To review clinically relevant outcome measures that have been proposed for use in uveitis investigations; how these measures relate to clinical trial design; and the potential techniques for objective quantification of study variables.
• To review progress toward standardization and validation of those techniques over the 5 years since the 2019 workshop.
• To discuss plans for future studies that will advance this field further.