Dear Colleagues,

Vision is a complex mechanism involving all the eye structures, the optic nerve, and the brain. Central to the process of vision is the retina, which converts light signals into electric signals that the brain finally interprets as vision. The retina is a thin layer of neural tissue that is unable to regenerate after damage, and it is subjected throughout life to continuous strong oxidative stress, which comes from light and the intense metabolic activities triggered by light in order to produce vision. The main pathologies affecting the retina are diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration, premature retinopathy, and glaucoma. The latter is often considered a class per se because of a completely different etiology; however, it primarily involves the retinal ganglion cells and so must be included within the group of retinopathies. Such retinopathies are all serious sight-threatening diseases, responsible for the loss of vision of hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide, and for which, however, we still lack reliable and efficient treatments.

In this Special Issue we intend to present the most recent knowledge on the etiology of each one of these pathologies, from which new therapeutic targets should emerge. Additionally, we intend to solicitate a new way to look at them, proposing new therapeutic approaches and innovative treatments, even at the hypothetic level, in order to stimulate and promote new research, hopefully leading to more efficient ways to fight these diseases.

Another point, equally critical, is the way to obtain an early diagnosis of the disease before it becomes clinically relevant in order to start possible non-invasive treatments able to delay progression as much as possible. Connected to this point is the necessity to have reliable, sensitive, short-term assays able to provide an efficient follow-up of treated patients in order to establish their response to the precocious therapies.

Therefore, all contributions to these fields (research papers, reviews, mini-reviews, documented hypotheses) are welcome for publication in this Special Issue.

Dr. Stefania Marsili
Dr. Dario Rusciano
Guest Editors

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• eye
• retina
• retinopathy
• early diagnosis
• novel therapies
• short-term follow-up