Anthony Khawaja

About Anthony Khawaja

In the last 12 months, Khawaja has led the large-scale discovery of the genetic causes of open-angle and angle-closure glaucoma, and developed novel clinical prediction tools to enable targeted screening and personalized care. His work has improved our understanding of what causes glaucoma, including the importance of anatomical structures beyond the trabecular meshwork and identifying pathways which are now being targeted by drugs in development.

He has led the development of highly effective polygenic risk scores (PRS), which can accurately determine an individual’s risk of glaucoma based on just their genetic code. In November 2025 he published a novel PRS for primary angle-closure glaucoma (Nature Communications). He is partnering with leading ophthalmic healthcare software providers to implement PRSs to enable targeting screening of glaucoma and personalized care of patients.

To accelerate the development and validation of genetic prediction tools, he has linked the UK Biobank study to rich clinical outcome data to make a globally unique resource of >75,000 individuals available to >20,000 investigators globally. The combination of whole genome sequencing, metabolomic and proteomic data with highly structured longitudinal clinical outcome data for glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy will open the door for researchers globally to make step-change research advances. Anthony also chairs the Institute for Digital Health’s Data Governance Committee, enabling researchers globally to ethically access another huge research resource that includes eye care imaging data for >400,000 patients.

Khawaja has established the NHS Imaging Interoperability Program, bringing together ophthalmology/optometry colleges with industry and the third sector to implement open imaging standards. In 2025, funding was secured to carry out an industry-wide audit of conformance to a DICOM-subset. He also established and chairs the SNOMED International Eye Care Clinical Reference Group, which in 2025 published a report making >500 additions for glaucoma terminology/coding, a critical enabler for interoperative care systems.