Felipe A. Medeiros

About Felipe A. Medeiros

“Over the past 12 to 18 months, my work has focused on addressing one of the most persistent barriers to therapeutic innovation in glaucoma: the lack of sensitive and biologically meaningful outcome measures capable of detecting change early enough to support disease modifying and neuroprotective therapies.

Glaucoma clinical trials have long relied on endpoints that are slow, noisy, and poorly aligned with the underlying neurodegenerative process, limiting the ability to demonstrate treatment effects and contributing to repeated translational failures. My recent efforts aim to change this paradigm by using artificial intelligence to rethink how change is measured, how frequently patients are tested, and how patients are selected for clinical trials.

A central focus of this work has been the development of AI-driven approaches that extract substantially more information from standard functional testing than conventional summary metrics. In parallel, my work has focused on optimizing both who is studied and how change is measured over time. Data driven methods show that tailoring testing frequency over focused intervals can dramatically improve sensitivity to functional change, challenging the long-held assumption that progression requires years of follow-up. When combined with AI-based analysis and risk stratification, these strategies enable enrichment of trials with informative patients, increasing statistical power while reducing trial duration and cost, and also support more personalized clinical decision making.

Alongside these methodological advances, my research has increasingly focused on aging as a fundamental biological driver of glaucoma. Over the past year we have generated evidence linking accelerated biological aging, measured using epigenetic markers in peripheral blood, to faster functional decline. This work provides a mechanistic bridge between systemic aging processes and optic nerve vulnerability, and points toward new biomarkers that may further refine risk stratification and therapeutic targeting.

Collectively, these efforts seek to modernize how glaucoma is monitored and treated. Ultimately, the impact I hope to have is to help move the field from managing progression to modifying disease, ensuring that emerging therapies have the tools they need to succeed.”