PROTON : Programme for Ocular Inflammation & Infection Translational Research
Introduction
{"type":"doc","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"PROTON: Programme for Ocular Inflammation & Infection Translational Research"}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"Ocular inflammatory and infectious diseases are a leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide, disproportionately affecting working-age adults and populations in low- and middle-income countries where access to specialist care and research participation has historically been limited. Despite this burden, the evidence base remains fragmented; studies are small, geographically narrow and rarely capture the infectious aetiologies that dominate in non-Western settings."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"PROTON was established to change the narrative. Hosted at the Tan Tock Seng Hospital- Eye Institute, National Healthcare Group, Singapore and endorsed by the International Ocular Inflammation Society, the International Uveitis Study Group, the Asia-Pacific Ocular Imaging Society, and the Foster Ocular Immunology Society, PROTON is a global, patient-centred research programme built on a foundation of genuine geographic diversity, spanning over 30 countries and 100 sites across continents, with strong representation from South and Southeast Asian population."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"The programme grew from a decade of registry-based research, beginning with the Ocular Autoimmune Systemic Inflammatory Infectious Study (OASIS), a multisite clinical cohort that demonstrated the feasibility and scientific value of collecting standardised, longitudinal data on ocular inflammatory and infectious diseases across international centres. Building on this foundation, PROTON now operates an ambispective registry capturing multimodal data on patients with all forms of ocular inflammatory and infectious disease, from anterior segment inflammation to posterior segment infections and neuroretinitis, across a standardised 10-year follow-up framework. The programme integrates structured clinical phenotyping, multimodal ophthalmic imaging, immunological and molecular data and patient-reported outcomes all held within the PROTON Data Lake under a governance framework aligned with FAIR data principles."}]},{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"text","text":"The programme's ambition is to generate the kind of large-scale, diverse, real-world evidence that the ocular inflammatory and infectious disease area has lacked and to translate it into better diagnostics, prognostic tools and outcomes for patients globally."}]}]}
