Unblinded: The Start-Up That Launched a Revolution in Saving Sight

Unblinded is the never-before-heard origin story of intravitreal, anti-VEGF therapies for macular degeneration, and other retinal diseases, and the start-up company that changed the future of eyecare.

A life-altering revolution has happened right before your eyes. Yet for a generation, it has been largely invisible.

In the 1990s, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) was the leading cause of blindness in the developed world, with no effective treatments. The disease became known for robbing its elderly victims of their central vision and the opportunity to age gracefully, leaving them with the fear of going blind. Today, this is no longer the case for most people.

Going against the grain, three young eye doctors challenged the prevailing views of the ophthalmological establishment and formed a start-up drug company, Eyetech, in 2000 to develop the first anti-VEGF therapy, Macugen. David Guyer, MD, a New York academic; Tony Adamis, MD, a medical research scientist in Boston; and Samir Patel, MD, a leading surgeon based in Chicago, joined forces to refocus the pharmaceutical industry's attention from the front of the eye to the back. This team successfully overcame enormous hurdles to create a therapeutic approach from scratch that, as of 2025, represents >$15bn of revenue in one of the highest billed procedures on Medicare.

In Unblinded, you'll discover how a trio of doctors stepped out of their comfort zones into a world where groundbreaking biotechnology tussles with multimillion-dollar risk-taking--often amid financial market turmoil. Despite the turbulence of their journey, David, Samir, Tony, and their many contemporaries have never taken their eyes off the ultimate prize--improving sight.