EURETINA 2024: Andrea Govetto, MD, PhD, says it takes teamwork to understand macular oedema

On the opening day of the European Society of Retina Specialists (EURETINA) meeting, Andrea Govetto, MD, PhD, received the inaugural Ramin Tadayoni Award. Then he visited the Ophthalmology Times Europe booth to discuss his wonderful research team, the things we fail to understand about diabetic macular oedema and what makes EURETINA a must-see conference.

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Andrea Govetto, MD, PhD: Hello. I'm Andrea Govetto. I'm a VR surgeon at the Humanitas University in Milan, and I'm here at EURETINA as a presenter in the faculty.

I'm honored to receive the [Ramin Tadayoni] award. The project is very cool, actually. It's a computational model of fluid flow in macular oedema.

So macular oedema is something that many people think is obvious, but is not, because we actually don't know why the cysts form where they are located and why they persist in some cases. So the engineers, because I don't know anything about mathematics—the award will go to pay the engineers to explain, to make a mathematical simulation and explain me why the cysts in macular oedema form, and why so specifically in the macula, which is a very particular part of the retina. My guess is that the morphology of the cell there plays a key role in the formation of the oedema.

You know, nobody likes to work for free, so it's important to reward the work of others. So, I work with a beautiful team. My chief is Mario Romano, who is also presenting here at EURETINA, and I work with two very talented engineers, which are Alessia Ruffini from Genoa and Rodolfo Repetto from Genoa. The bulk of work for the mathematics is on them. So, these funds will go, partially, to pay them for their great work. It's a way to reward what they are doing because until now, they’ve worked for free, basically.

So, specifically, epiretinal membranes and the laminar macular holes. Actually, tomorrow, we have a very great session, with, ESASO and FLORETINA on laminar macular holes. A lot of very good presenters will be there, me as well. So it will be fun and interesting to see.

And then I have a course, which we did also last year at EURETINA, purely focused on the epiretinal membrane, and I will speak, specifically, about the pathophysiology and the classification of an epiretinal membrane that we developed in these years. So I think it would be very interesting to attend.

The most interesting thing about this meeting is connections. I'm lucky, because I know many people around the globe, and many of them are coming here to Barcelona. So it's a way to see my friends that live abroad in South America, in Argentina, in the US, in Japan. So I like very much the connections that you can make here in EURETINA.