We continue with our ARVO 2025 coverage here in Salt Lake City by recapping the day—and speaking to one of industry’s first 2025 Carl Camras Translational Research Award recipients.
Has The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology 2025 Annual Meeting (ARVO 2025) gone corporate?
This is a conversation your correspondent has had many times with colleagues, industry friends and attendee doctors and researchers since the start of ARVO 2025 in Salt Lake City, and especially here on Day 2.
Context: For those readers who don’t know, the ARVO Annual Meeting is considered by many to be one of the last bastions of pure science and research in an eye care conference world increasingly dominated by commercial interests and industry partnerships.
READ MORE: “First, Do No Harm”: ARVO-Genentech Keynote Expounds Ethical Vision for AI in Eye Care
The overwhelming feeling at ARVO is, or at least has been, that posters, imagination and independent, early-stage innovation and ideation is the emphasis, with industry merely tolerated as a financial means to put the show on.
Suits are traded for jeans, sweatshirts and university-branded apparel. Wild, untamed ingenuity is celebrated over conformity and mainstream lines of thought. Lab rats, grad students and mad scientists tinkering late into the night emerge from the depths to show off the fruits of their labor on a level playing field. It’s punk rock, indie vision science in a world where it sometimes feels that major labels get all the airtime.
But the whispers on the show floor are that things are somehow different this year. The exhibition hall feels much bigger than even last year in Seattle. Industry symposia are rumored (unconfirmed) to be more abundant. The understandable insecurity over the recent, shocking cuts to research funding in the United States has evolved into paranoia that this funding gap will be filled by industry and the strings that are perceived to come attached.
But the spirit of ARVO has always been the rebellious spirit of innovation. This is what has made it your correspondent’s favorite stop on the eye care meeting circuit, and regardless of any increase in industry presence (perceived or not), it’s what makes ARVO, ARVO—and in 2025 it’s alive and well.
For proof, look no further than the Proctor Medal and Friedenwald Award lectures, one piece of our reporting puzzle here in Salt Lake City today. Proctor Medial co-recipients Drs. Christine Curcio and Cynthia Owsley talked about an under-the-radar biomarker that could pack a punch in predicting AMD progression early, while Friedenwald awardee Dr. Connie Cepko thrilled the audience with an ode to the artistic beauty of the retina and optic nerve. Not exactly your run-of-the mill fare, to be sure, so read now for the latest.
READ MORE: Inspiring Award Lectures at ARVO 2025 Highlight Decades of Visionary Work
And one of the clearest examples that punk rock innovation is still alive at ARVO 2025? The jaw-dropping Emerging Waves in Digital Eye Health session! Here, AI met ophthalmology head-on—from custom large language models (LLMs) trained on patient notes to benchmarking tools built like Formula 1 test tracks. And just when you thought it couldn’t get more futuristic, a 5G enabled mobile eye hospital rolled onto the scene. If you want to see how vision science is being rebooted for the digital age, this one’s a must read!
READ MORE: Emerging Waves in Digital Eye Health at ARVO 2025
That’s a wrap for Day 2 here at ARVO 2025, but we aren’t even at the halfway point of our coverage. See you tomorrow for the latest from Day 3, where plenty more cutting-edge ingenuity will be on display.
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Editor’s Note: Reporting for this story took place during the annual meeting of The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO 2025) being held from 4-8 May in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States.
