Dr Cynthia Yu-Wai-Man MBBS FRCOphth PhD

Dr Cynthia Yu-Wai-Man is an MRC Clinician Scientist at King's College London and Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon in Glaucoma and Cataract. She qualified from Newcastle University in 2005 and became a fellow of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists (London) in 2013. She completed her subspecialty surgical fellowship in glaucoma at St Thomas' Hospital. During her undergraduate research at the Institute of Genetic Medicine, she identified a novel POLG2 variant in progressive external ophthalmoplegia (Am J Hum Genet 2006). She was an NIHR Crick Clinical Research Fellow at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital (PhD 2014-2017). Dr Yu-Wai-Man has also received several prestigious awards as PI, namely the MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship (2020), King's Prize Fellowship (2019), NIHR CRN Greenshoots funding (2019), MRC Confidence-in-Concept Grant (2016) and EUREKA Translational Medicine Fellowship (2015).

Dr Yu-Wai-Man leads the Glaucoma and Therapeutics Lab at King's College London. She has set up a project licence and animal models for the preclinical testing of new therapeutics and devices in glaucoma. She has also set up a UK Glaucoma BioResource of RNA, DNA and tissue samples from glaucoma patients, linked to detailed longitudinal phenotyping and imaging modalities. Her group is focused on translational research, multi-omics research in glaucoma and personalised medicine.

Dr Yu-Wai-Man is the Chief Investigator of advanced therapeutics and nanomedicine in glaucoma surgery. Her research goal is to bring new nanomedicine treatments to clinic. Nanotechnology enables the design of multifunctional and targeted therapies, thereby increasing the therapeutic efficacy and reducing the side effects for patients. Dr Yu-Wai-Man has published several peer-reviewed publications, and has shown that targeted siRNA therapeutics and novel therapeutic nanocomplexes increase bleb survival and prevent conjunctival fibrosis after glaucoma surgery.