A Vision for Patient-Centric Gene Therapy Development

Last year, the Retinal Degeneration Fund, a venture philanthropy established by the patient advocacy organization Foundation for Fighting Blindness, spun out Opus Genetics to develop gene therapies to treat rare, inherited, retinal diseases. The patient organization’s then CEO Ben Yerxa, who also headed the RD Fund, recently became the full-time CEO of Opus. We spoke to Yerxa about the genesis of Opus, its gene therapy pipeline, and what other patient organizations looking to take a more hands-on approach to therapeutic development can learn from its example.