Cynomolgus Macaque Studies in AMD in the MICRON Literature

About the MICRON Research Literature

These research pages organize published studies using MICRON imaging systems by animal species and the disease or condition investigated.

All publication counts and figures reflect the complete indexed research collection.

Explore related studies through the MICRON Research Hubs or search the complete publication collection in the reSEARCH portal.

Understanding AMD

Age-related macular degeneration is a disease of the macula with two forms that can coexist in the same eye:

• Neovascular AMD involves new vessel growth that most commonly arises from the choroid, either remaining beneath the retinal pigment epithelium or entering the subretinal space, with a third form originating in the retinal circulation
• Atrophic AMD involves loss of photoreceptors, retinal pigment epithelium and choriocapillaris

Where the vessels leak, that leakage is directly imageable, which is why angiography recurs as a readout in this literature. Without an exudative component there is usually no leakage to image, so assessment of atrophic disease turns on what remains of the retina and how well it works.

AMD in Experimental Research

In neovascular disease, leakage is directly imageable by angiography. In atrophic disease, assessment turns on layer thickness and lesion area by cross-sectional imaging and autofluorescence, and on function by electrophysiological or behavioral measures.

Macaques have a true macula and fovea, so neovascular change can be induced and read out, and atrophic change can be followed, in the anatomy where the human disease occurs. Species without a macula model components of the disease and AMD-like endpoints rather than the macular anatomy of the human condition.

Cynomolgus Macaque in AMD Research

Macaques have a true macula and fovea, so effects involving central retinal anatomy can be studied directly rather than through a non-macular analogue.

Their similarity to human retinal structure and physiology makes them valuable where macular anatomy, foveal function, ocular delivery or translational safety is central to the question.

Published MICRON Research: AMD in Cynomolgus Macaques

This page lists 4 papers from the MICRON literature, published 2024 to 2025, that study age-related macular degeneration in cynomolgus macaques.

Of these publications:

• 2 studies used cynomolgus macaques as the primary age-related macular degeneration disease model.
• 2 studies used healthy animals to assess pharmacokinetics, drug delivery, or tolerability.

Scope of the literature collection: Publication counts reflect studies identified and indexed in the MICRON research corpus. This collection is not intended to represent an exhaustive review of all published age-related macular degeneration research.

Which imaging and experimental techniques are used in these studies?

Technique counts are paper-level co-occurrences and do not necessarily indicate that a technique was applied to the focal species or focal disease model.

Capabilities and Limitations of Imaging Techniques

A summary of what each imaging technique listed above can measure, the information it provides, and its limitations in research applications.

Fundus Fluorescein Angiography

Fundus fluorescein angiography uses an injected fluorescent dye to visualize blood flow through the retinal and choroidal circulation. Sequential images show how vessels fill, identify areas of reduced or absent perfusion, and reveal dye leakage associated with vascular abnormalities.

This technique is particularly useful for evaluating vascular perfusion, blood-retinal barrier integrity, and abnormal vessel growth. Fluorescein angiography primarily shows dye distribution rather than the surrounding retinal tissue. It provides a two-dimensional (en face) view in which vessels at different depths may overlap. Cross-sectional and cellular structural details require other imaging methods, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) or optical coherence tomography angiography (OCT-A). Vascular abnormalities that do not affect dye filling or produce leakage may also remain undetected.

Intravitreal Injection / Delivery

Injection into the vitreous places a substance directly into the vitreous at a known administered dose and chosen time, reducing but not eliminating systemic exposure. The injectate may be a therapeutic compound, cell preparation or viral vector, or an agent used to create the model, such as a toxin, vasoactive or excitotoxic compound, or infectious inoculum. The route bypasses surface-delivery barriers and provides direct access to the vitreous and posterior segment, but the concentration reached in a particular ocular tissue depends on distribution and clearance and is not fixed by the injected dose alone. It is invasive and discrete: each repeat dose or challenge requires another injection, and vehicle- or sham-injected controls can help separate effects of the injectate from effects of the procedure.

Optical Coherence Tomography

Optical coherence tomography provides high-resolution, cross-sectional images of ocular tissues in the living eye, allowing researchers to visualize structures at different depths. OCT is particularly useful for measuring tissue thickness, identifying structural abnormalities, and assessing the location and extent of tissue changes.

As a non-invasive imaging technique, OCT enables repeated measurements in the same eye over time, supporting longitudinal studies of disease progression and treatment response. Although OCT provides detailed structural information, it does not directly measure cellular activity or visual function. Tissue that appears structurally normal may still have functional abnormalities, making OCT a valuable companion to functional assessments such as electroretinography (ERG).

Topical Ophthalmic Drug Delivery

A compound applied as drops to the ocular surface. It is non-invasive and repeatable, so it supports frequent dosing without a procedure for each dose. What the route has to establish depends on the target: for an ocular-surface target, residence time and penetration into the surface tissue are the main barriers; for an intraocular anterior-segment target, the compound must cross ocular-surface and corneal or conjunctival barriers and reach an intraocular concentration sufficient for the experiment; for a posterior-segment target, additional ocular barriers separate the surface from the target and posterior-segment exposure is harder to establish.

AAV-Mediated Ocular Gene Delivery

An adeno-associated viral vector delivers genetic material to ocular cells, and a single administration can support long-lived transgene expression. That persistence is useful for gene augmentation and sustained therapeutic-protein expression; AAV can also deliver gene-silencing or genome-editing cargo, where long-lived expression of the editing machinery may be unnecessary or undesirable. Capsid and route of delivery jointly determine which cells are reached, so different delivery routes and vector designs give different distributions.

Electroretinography

Records the retina's electrical response to light, giving component-sensitive information about outer- and inner-retinal function. It measures function directly, which no structural method does. Full-field ERG sums across the whole retina, so a small lesion can leave the trace unchanged; focal and multifocal variants trade signal amplitude for spatial resolution.

Laser Photocoagulation Models

A laser lesion provokes a reproducible, quantifiable injury at a known time and place. Wavelength, power, duration, spot size, pulse mode, focus and lesion location together determine the injury produced, allowing laser exposure to be configured for different experimental endpoints. It is an induced injury, not the disease: it produces a lesion directly, bypassing the process that gives rise to comparable damage in patients.

Optokinetic / Optomotor Response

Measures a reflexive head or eye movement tracking a moving pattern, giving a rapid, training-free behavioral estimate of spatial vision and contrast sensitivity in an animal that cannot report them. It is driven largely by reflex circuitry and reports on the visual pathway as a whole, so a deficit it detects still has to be localized by a structural or electrophysiological method, or separated from cortical processing by an operant task.

RPE Cell Transplantation

Places retinal pigment epithelium cells into the subretinal space to supply the supporting functions of that layer, among them outer segment renewal, the visual cycle and the barrier between the choroidal circulation and the outer retina. The deficit it addresses is functional, so it applies where those cells are failing as well as where they have been lost, and what it is meant to preserve is the photoreceptors that depend on their support. That layer sits in an interdependent complex with photoreceptors, Bruch's membrane and the choriocapillaris, so supplying one element of that complex need not restore the rest. Survival, orientation and integration of the graft are the open questions, and a graft that can be seen to survive has not yet been shown to work, so a functional readout is needed alongside the structural one.

Which MICRON systems and add-ons appear?

Which other species appear alongside?

What other conditions are recorded on the same papers?

The general term records an accepted mention of age-related macular degeneration without a subtype qualifier. It is not a roll-up: a paper carrying a subtype may or may not also carry the general term, depending on whether an unqualified mention of the family is also recorded elsewhere in the paper.

Which MICRON configurations appear in this work?

Configurations recorded in these papers, and the techniques recorded alongside them.

The papers

Browse all hubs at MICRON Research Hubs. The full corpus is searchable in the reSEARCH portal.