High Z Oraya Therapy for wet AMD

Project Description The purpose of this project is to develop a new radiotherapy treatment modality that will substantially enhance the treatment of wet AMD with minimal toxicity to healthy tissue, leading to major improvement in visual acuity, decreaseduse of intravitreal injections of anti-VEGF agents, lower cost of treatment, and a substantially improved quality of life for patients. The new modality entitled Customizable Radiotherapy Enhancement (CuRE) using gold nanoparticles will enable major highly localized amplification of radiation damage to the neovascular AMD disease cells with minimal normal ocular tissue toxicity. In order to accomplish this, a potent amount of gold nanoparticles (AuNP), acting as smart bombs will be targeted specificallyto the neovascular AMD (disease) endothelial cells (ECs) as demonstrated in published simulations by Harvard Medical School project partner. Once the AuNP home on to the disease ECs, a relatively small amount of radiation will be focused on the AuNP. The