José-Alain Sahel, MD, To Receive 2026 ARVO Proctor Medal

José-Alain Sahel, MD, distinguished professor and chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and director of the UPMC Vision Institute, will receive the 2026 Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) Proctor Medal in honor of his outstanding contributions to the field of ophthalmology at the 2026 ARVO annual meeting May 3 – 7 in Denver. Dr. Sahel will also deliver the Proctor Award Lecture at the event. 

ARVO aims to advance research worldwide to better understand vision and prevent, treat, and cure visual disorders. Founded in 1928 in Washington, D.C., its current members include nearly 12,000 clinical and basic science researchers from more than 60 countries. The Proctor Medal, ARVO’s highest recognition since 1949, honors the memory of Francis I. Proctor, MD, an ophthalmologist whose research on trachoma led to significant advancements in the understanding and treatment of the disease. 

Throughout his career, Dr. Sahel has conducted innovative research and pioneered therapies to prevent vision loss and restore sight in people with inherited retinal disorders like retinitis pigmentosa, a group of degenerative conditions that lead to vision loss. His work includes the development of a novel retinal prosthesis and the employment of optogenetics – which uses light to control cell activity – for vision restoration. 

Among his most notable accomplishments, Dr. Sahel and his colleague Botond Roska, MD, PhD, of the Institute for Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB), published a groundbreaking study in Nature Medicine in 2021 that outlined the use of optogenetics in the first instance of partial vision restoration in a human patient. 

Dr. Sahel has published more than 750 peer-reviewed articles, co-authored more than 90 patents, and co-founded multiple start-up companies. He serves as director at the Foundation Fighting Blindness Retinal Degeneration Fund and as an advisor to LightStone Ventures. In addition to his leadership roles at Pitt and the UPMC Vision Institute, Dr. Sahel also serves as executive vice president of UPMC Enterprises and chief of the UPMC Health Technology Advancement Program. Dr. Sahel is also the co-founder of SparingVision and the founder of Avista Therapeutics, which are both part of UPMC Enterprises' portfolio. At ARVO 2025, SparingVision announced favorable safety updates from their PRODYGY trial and Avista participated in an oral presentation titled "Revolutionizing intravitreal gene therapy: Integrating machine learning-guided design of high-complexity AAV capsid libraries with the scAAVengr-HUnT platform."