\n<\/p>\n
During her lifetime, the beloved American actor Mary Tyler Moore was an outspoken advocate for type 1 diabetes (T1D) research. Since her passing in 2017, her husband, S. Robert Levine, MD, has led an ambitious initiative aimed at transforming the clinical approach to the diabetic retinal disease (DRD) that plagued Moore in her later years.<\/p>\n
The initiative was first launched in 2018 in collaboration with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (now Breakthrough T1D), for which Moore had served as international chairperson for over 30 years. Initially called the \u201cRestoring Vision Moonshot,\u201d it was renamed the Mary Tyler Moore (MTM) Vision Initiative in 2022.<\/p>\n
\u201cVision loss was the diabetes\u2019 complication that affected Mary\u2019s life the most. In her heart, Mary was a dancer. It was in dance that she found her joy. Diabetes stole her joy because diabetic retinal disease stole her vision,\u201d Levine told Medscape Medical News<\/em>.<\/p>\n The initiative aims to accelerate research efforts to prevent and restore vision loss due to DRD, a term that includes diabetes-related retinopathy, macular edema, and retinal neurodegeneration. Its goals include the development of a new DRD staging system, identification of new endpoints and biomarkers, artificial intelligence-enhanced diagnostics, and ultimately new preventive approaches and treatments such as retinal regeneration or replacement.<\/p>\n \u201cWe brought together retina experts from all over the world, and one of the first things we decided to invest in was an update of the current Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study [ETDRS] staging system, which is 50 years old and unidimensional. It only looks the vascular side of the disease, and we now know that DRD is a disease of the entire retinal neurovascular unit,\u201d Levine explained.<\/p>\n In fact, he noted, as many as 30% of people with diabetes who have normal-appearing retinas on photography already have demonstrable visual field defects. \u201cSo there needs to be a better way to stage. And once you have a better way of staging, you can create new indications for therapeutics development.\u201d<\/p>\n While chronically elevated glucose levels raise the odds of developing DRD, everyone living with diabetes is at risk. One recent study showed that more than half the people who develop diabetes \u2014 type 1 or type 2 \u2014 in childhood develop DRD by a mean age of 26 years.<\/p>\n Current treatments include laser photocoagulation, anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) injections, and surgery (vitrectomy). While these can preserve sight in many with late-stage DRD, they don\u2019t work for everyone. Moreover, all involve some degree of risk, including scarring with laser treatments and infection with invasive eye injections, Jennifer Sun, MD, scientific co-director of the initiative, told Medscape Medical News<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of room for new, more effective therapies that are nondestructive and noninvasive,\u201d said Sun, who is also a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n Moore herself underwent multiple laser treatments after being diagnosed with proliferative retinopathy in the mid-1980\u2019s. At that point, she had lived with T1D for about 16 years.<\/p>\n \u201cThe laser preserved her central vision, so she continued to be able to read and to perform, but dancing requires peripheral vision and her visual fields were narrowed considerably. Over time, it got much worse, to the point where she really couldn\u2019t safely cross a room without assistance. And ultimately, later in life, she was nearly blind,\u201d Levine said.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a clinician, I would also love to see therapies that treat earlier stage disease, so that we\u2019re not waiting for people to lose vision or be on the brink of losing vision before we treat them,\u201d said Sun.<\/p>\n As well as looking for preventive strategies to help patients with diabetes maintain their vision, the initiative is also looking for therapies that work on a global perspective, that is \u201ctherapies that are readily accessible, affordable, and that can be safely administered, without the need for super-specialized care,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n Levine told Medscape Medical News<\/em> that the initiative \u201chas organized a public-private precompetitive consortium that enables industry to gain access to the data and research being developed by the initiative.\u201d This consortium is based at the University of Michigan, with Harvard\u2019s Joslin Diabetes Center as a lead academic partner. Funding comes from private philanthropy, including Breakthrough T1D, for core projects.<\/p>\n Boehringer Ingelheim joined the consortium in late 2024, followed by \u201cnumerous device manufacturers, biotech companies, and major pharmaceutical companies as members and project-specific supporters.\u201d<\/p>\n Separately, the Entertainment Industry Foundation \u2014 which founded \u201cStand Up to Cancer\u201d \u2014 and Variety<\/em> magazine lend publicity support to the initiative.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re positioning ourselves as an accelerator. We can\u2019t do everything, but we\u2019re doing what we can to attract investment, both of intellectual capital and dollars, to help accelerate the development of new therapeutics to eliminate vision loss,\u201d Levine said.<\/p>\n While it doesn\u2019t actually conduct clinical trials of new therapies, the initiative identifies needs, provides resource materials for researchers including an ocular biorepository and a retinal image database, sponsors a yearly symposium and workshops, and publishes papers to raise awareness of various aspects of DRD.<\/p>\n It also incorporates the patient voice. Patients and caregivers are invited to participate in a virtual meeting on February 12, 2026, to inform the FDA and other stakeholders about \u201cexperiences, perspectives, needs, and priorities\u201d regarding drug development and regulatory decision-making.<\/p>\n The initiative also works with the longstanding DRCR Retina Network (formerly the Diabetic Retinopathy Clinical Research Network) funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support large multicenter clinical trials to validate biomarkers and endpoints that would be needed to accelerate product approvals.<\/p>\n Sun, who also co-leads the DRCR, explained, \u201cWe designed studies that we then brought to the DRCR investigator and coordinator group. We asked if they would partner with us to use the DRCR\u2019s existing clinical trial infrastructure to perform them.\u201d<\/p>\n Two upcoming studies for which the protocols were developed by the MTM Vision Initiative will be conducted by DRCR. One will examine functional endpoints in about 100 patients over the course of 1 year following anti-VEGF treatment for diabetic macular edema. The other is a larger and longer natural history study that will follow patients for over 4 years.<\/p>\n \u201cI think these two studies will start to identify ways to characterize the retinas of people with diabetes, and start to build expectations of how we how we look at and describe patients\u2019 visual function,\u201d said Sun.<\/p>\n \u201cHopefully, these studies will provide ways to measure vision that will be more sensitive, more attuned to early changes, and that will help us efficiently find targets for new treatments.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked to comment on the initiative, Stephen J. Kim, MD, the Phyllis G. and William B. Snyder Chair and Retina Division Chief at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, told Medscape Medical News<\/em>, \u201cIt a relatively new initiative that\u2019s growing in popularity. They\u2019re doing a good job of getting buy-in from experts to come to their meetings, to collaborate, and to have a shared vision.\u201d<\/p>\n Compared to the traditional DRCR Network, the MTM Vision Initiative \u201chas a different angle,\u201d said Kim, who was an author of the American Academy of Ophthalmology\u2019s 2025 Diabetic Retinopathy Preferred Practice Pattern. \u201cIt\u2019s trying to incorporate new technologies, [and] new ways of diagnosing and defining the disease.\u201d<\/p>\n This could help speed the time to new therapeutic discovery. \u201cOne of the main things\u201d the initiative is doing is looking for \u201cdifferent biomarkers that can show us changes in the disease process,\u201d Kim said.<\/p>\n \u201cRight now, they\u2019re just in the process of validating new markers for clinical trials. Once they start adopting or pushing one, there may be controversy,\u201d he noted. \u201cBut it\u2019s not controversial now.\u201d<\/p>\n Levine and Moore met in 1982, when she brought her mother into the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City one night when Levine happened to be on call. At the time, he was a cardiology fellow and founder of the institution\u2019s cardiovascular disease prevention and rehabilitation program. They married the following year.<\/p>\n In 1985, Moore decided to accept the position as international chair of the organization then called the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (JDF). \u201cAt that time, there weren\u2019t a lot of celebrities willing to risk their careers by being public about their struggles with chronic disease,\u201d Levine noted.<\/p>\n Moore was a dancer first, then an actor in two iconic American sitcoms \u2014 The Dick Van Dyke Show<\/em> in the 1960s and The Mary Tyler Moore Show<\/em> in the 1970s.<\/p>\n As a diabetes advocate, she helped raise billions of dollars for research funding. According to the site, \u201cWhile Mary did not see a cure for diabetes in her lifetime, her legacy of leading efforts to ensure that future generations would not have to experience [its burdens] as she did, lives on through our work.\u201d<\/p>\n Three years after Moore started as chair of the JDF, Levine left his cardiology practice to volunteer full-time for the Foundation, serving at various times as head of their government relations program and of their communications committee. He also helped develop their research strategy, and played a major role in securing bipartisan Congressional passage of funding for the Special Diabetes Program, which both advanced T1D research at the NIH and provided T2D treatment, education, and prevention programs for American Indian and Alaska Native populations. Today, Levine devotes nearly all his time to the MTM Vision Initiative.<\/p>\n The meetings and programs of the MTM Vision Initiative received educational and research grant support from a number of pharma, biotech, and device companies. Levine reported being occasionally provided with compensation and travel reimbursement for invited presentations for pharma collaborators.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Sun reported receiving research support from Adaptive Sensory Technology, Boehringer Ingelheim, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Genentech, LKC Technologies, Konan, Novo Nordisk, Optovue, Inc., and Physical Sciences, Inc., and other relationships with Alcon, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Novo Nordisk. Kim disclosed having no relevant financial relationships.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Miriam E. Tucker is a freelance journalist based in the Washington, DC, area. She is a regular contributor to Medscape, with other work appearing in the Washington Post, NPR\u2019s Shots blog, and Diatribe. She is on X @MiriamETucker and BlueSky @miriametucker.bsky.social.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n During her lifetime, the beloved American actor Mary Tyler Moore was an outspoken advocate for type 1 diabetes (T1D) research. Since her passing in 2017, her husband, S. Robert Levine, MD, has led an ambitious initiative aimed at transforming the clinical approach to the diabetic retinal disease (DRD) that plagued Moore in her later years. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16552,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_daextam_enable_autolinks":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/is_180927_diabetic_retinopathy_800x450.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Limitations of Current Treatments<\/h2>\n
Public, Private, and Patients Together<\/h2>\n
A \u2018Different Angle\u2019<\/h2>\n
Moore\u2019s Influence in Life and Beyond<\/h2>\n
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