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Knights Templar Eye Foundation, Inc.

A Predictive Medicine Approach to Childhood Blindness

David Cobrinik, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Ophthalmology and Biochemistry &
Molecular Medicine, The USC Roski Eye Institute and Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center,
Division of Ophthalmology, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and a member of the Knights
Templar Eye Foundation Scientific Advisory Committee (KTEF).
As indicated I am a member of the KTEF Scientific Advisory Committee for the past five years
and a member of a team of childhood blindness researchers at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
(CHLA). However, I was not always a vision researcher. In college, my research focused on
genes that cause tumors in plants. This got me interested in understanding how genes cause
human diseases, and I continued studying cancer because that was the first area to which I
was exposed. After graduate school at Case Western Reserve University, I took a postdoctoral
position in an MIT laboratory that was studying a childhood eye cancer called retinoblastoma.
They and others had been in a race to clone the gene that causes retinoblastoma, and by the
time I arrived the challenge had turned towards understanding how this gene causes the eye
cancer in children. Continuing as a faculty member at Columbia University, I realized that we
had to understand the retinal origin of retinoblastoma in order to develop preventive strategies.
Around this time I met Dr. Tom Lee, who passionately shared this interest and recruited me
to pursue this at Cornell Medical School. As a pediatric ophthalmologist, Tom also enlisted
me in efforts to study childhood blindness more broadly. He later recruited me to join the
Vision Center at CHLA and the KTEF scientific board. This increased my understanding and
appreciation of important childhood blinding conditions.
Of late, these experiences have enabled me to participate in the CHLA team that aims to model
inherited retinal dystrophies (the main genetic cause of childhood blindness) and curative
genetic approaches. (See below picture for team member details.) The team seeks to develop
a predictive medicine approach that was initiated by Dr. Lee, in which a blinding disease can
be modeled and a therapy developed in the interval between the first detection of the condition
and the irreversible retinal damage. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all cure, so we aim
to tailor approaches to the unique blinding mutations in each child. I am privileged to work
with the CHLA team and the Knights Templar Eye Foundation in this endeavor - to save the
vision of every at-risk child, one child at a time. Time is short and there is much to do.

David Cobrinik

CHLA Predictive Medicine Team members from left: David Cobrinik MD, PhD;
Jennifer Aparicio PhD; Aaron Nagiel MD, PhD, and team originator Tom Lee MD,
Additional members Jesse Berry MD and Paula Cannon PhD (not shown).
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