ARREST BLINDNESS Annual General Assembly Meeting, London, the UK, 08 – 09 February 2018

The General Assembly meeting with the entire External Advisory Board members took place in London, the UK, on 08-09 February, 2018. The Day 1 meeting covered review of the project activities from 2017, update on the project management (WP1) and the project dissemination and exploitation (WP8) as well as update on exploitation activities from the industrial partners. The Ethical Advisors attended the entire meeting while the Scientific External Advisor joined the meeting at 3pm on Day 1. The Day 2 meeting focused on clinical and regulatory elements including scientific results. All the External Advisors were present during Day 2.

Halfway point is achieved! Few highlights are presented below:

• 33 of 52 deliverables and 8 of 11 milestones were submitted during first half of the project,
• implementation of Bicornea in first patients,
• recruitment of LSCT trial patients,
• successful pre-clinical study with BPCDX intra-stromal implant,
• successful HCEC harvest, expansion protocol, successful PEC culture/adhesion/ex vivo transplantation on HALC,
• first high-resolution OCT able to visualise lymphatics in rodents and in humans,
• optimisation of physical methods targeted corneal lymphatics and
• novel candidate neurotrophic regenerative agent AB10 identified and tested pre-clinical for wound healing, tear film and blink reflex, etc.

Apart from the scientific side, there is also the management and dissemination/exploitation/communication side where following has been achieved:

• website, logo, flyer,
• 6 publications,
• 30 conference presentations,
• 11 invited talks,
• 1 summer training school,
• 1 workshop,
• 1 popular science article,
• 1 video,
• integration of the External Advisory Board,
• exploitation activities such as data for CE studies for Biocornea, data for human studies for BPCDX implants, new therapeutic compounds, parameters for lymphangioregression, etc.