Adnan Tufail

About Adnan Tufail

Adnan Tufail is a world-leading ophthalmologist whose work over the past year has been shaped by a central conviction: that artificial intelligence in eye care must be rigorously validated, equitable across populations, and developed through meaningful collaboration between clinicians, data scientists, and industry partners.

This conviction underpins Adnan's leadership of the largest AI validation study ever conducted in diabetic retinopathy screening. Rather than relying on vendor-led assessments using curated datasets, his team built a vendor-independent evaluation platform using the most ethnically diverse NHS screening dataset available from North-East London. Multiple CE-marked AI systems were tested under identical computational conditions, enabling direct, transparent comparison of performance — including fairness across demographic subgroups. Accepted by The Lancet Digital Health, this work provides the evidence base for potential national deployment of AI across England's nearly four million diabetes patients, and establishes a replicable methodology now being adapted for other non- ophthalmology screening programmes. Adnan also contributed to the development of the Retinal Pigment Score (RPS), published in Nature Communications in 2025 — an open-source, machine-learning-derived metric that replaces subjective ethnic categorisation with an objective biological measure of retinal pigmentation, offering a practical tool for reducing bias in AI development and clinical trial design. In addition, he supports the AI evaluation frameworks for low-resource settings in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Tanzania.

In age-related macular degeneration, Adnan's research continues to deliver clinically meaningful insights. By integrating AI-driven retinal image analysis with UK Biobank genetic data, his team identified a major genetic association between HTRA1/ARMS2 and reticular pseudodrusen — the principal driver of progression to late AMD — while demonstrating that complement pathways are not implicated. This finding has direct therapeutic relevance, particularly for drug development pipelines currently targeting complement. These genetic leads are now being pursued through the Said Foundation AMD Initiative, which Adnan leads with five years of funding to identify novel treatment targets for dry AMD.

As co-lead of the €16.7 million EU MACUSTAR consortium — bringing together Novartis, Bayer, Roche, and leading academic centres — Adnan continues to refine functional and structural endpoints for intermediate AMD clinical trials. The willingness of competing pharmaceutical partners to extend this collaboration, most recently with additional funding secured in late 2025, reflects the programme's value in de-risking trial design for a disease area with enormous unmet need.

Adnan's influence extends across the global ophthalmic community. Elected to the EURETINA Board in 2025, he plays an active role in shaping the direction of retinal medicine internationally. His teaching reaches across continents — from Nepal and Sri Lanka to China and Uzbekistan amongst others

Across every strand of this work, the common thread is partnership: between disciplines, between academia and industry, and between healthcare systems worldwide — all directed toward ensuring that the next generation of ophthalmic technologies is effective, fair, and ready for the patients who need them most.