The Time is Now to Protect the National Eye Institute

A Statement from the Research to Prevent Blindness Board of Trustees

What if we told you that with an aging, expanding population and ever-increasing medical costs the societal burden of sight-threatening eye diseases is going up, but the U.S. government’s investment in research into eye diseases—the very work that creates treatments and cures for vision loss—could go down dramatically? The National Eye Institute (NEI)—which is the most important source of funding for all of vision research in the U.S.—is being threatened by a proposal from a committee in the House of Representatives to collapse the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) 27 institutes into 15 institutes. In this plan, the NEI would cease to exist, and its work left to a general brain and neuroscience-focused institute.

The consequence? Less research into eye diseases—such as corneal diseases, dry eye, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, diabetic eye disease, inherited retinal diseases and more—will be funded and patients will ultimately be the ones to suffer.

Currently, the U.S. spends just over $2.25 per person per year on research to save and restore vision. In total, this investment in vision research is less than 1% of the estimated $276 billion that eye disorders and vision loss will cost Americans in 2025.  And these costs are predicted to increase dramatically over the coming decades as age-related eye diseases increase. By 2050, the total economic cost of major vision problems is estimated to increase to nearly $750 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Please join us in contacting your Congressional members to let them know that we need the National Eye Institute more than ever. Our colleagues at the National Alliance for Eye and Vision Research (NAEVR), an organization dedicated to advancing the national investment in eye and vision research have made it easy—simply fill out this pre-populated form, which automatically identifies your Representatives and Senators.

Why is Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB) so passionate about supporting the NEI? RPB founder Jules Stein is best known for being a giant in the world of entertainment – the founder of Music Corporation of America (MCA Inc.), which bought Universal Pictures and Decca Records. Stein’s actions helped build the U.S. entertainment industry into the second largest export industry in the country.

But one of his most important accomplishments was influencing Congress to create a new institute at the NIH in 1968: the National Eye Institute. Stein was trained as an ophthalmologist and, while his career went in a vastly different direction, he never gave up his passion for helping people to maintain what he called “the magnificent gift of sight.”

In Stein’s early efforts to catalyze treatments and cures for blinding eye diseases, he created RPB, the leading nonprofit organization supporting eye research directed at the prevention, treatment or eradication of all diseases that threaten vision. Since 1960, RPB has granted more than $420 million in eye disease research. We are immensely proud of the life-changing work that we do, and we recognize that the impact of our contribution would be far less without the NEI.

The NEI is the hub around which the entire U.S. vision research community revolves. Often, researchers who receive grants from public charities and foundations make the early discoveries that allow them to compete for significantly more funding from the NEI to continue their research and make field-changing progress. Many eye diseases now have sophisticated treatments and cures that we could not have imagined decades ago. Much of the early work to create those treatments and cures was funded in part by RPB, and then even more was funded by the NEI. We need the NEI to help all Americans see the future clearly.

On behalf of the Research to Prevent Blindness Board of Trustees, thank you for your attention to this important issue. We hope that you will stay in touch, be alert, and speak out on behalf of all Americans who have, or will have, a sight-threatening disease at some point in their lives. The risk of staying silent is too great, and the upside is clear: increased cost savings, productivity, and quality of life. In short, “magnificent” sight for a lifetime, for everyone.

December 17, 2024