Inflammatory and Fibrogenic Factors in Proliferative Vitreoretinopathy Development

PURPOSE: Proliferative vitreoretinopathy (PVR) occurs in 5%–10% of rhegmatogenous retinal detachment cases and is the principle cause for failure of retinal reattachment surgery. Although there are a number of surgical adjunctive agents available for preventing the development of PVR, all have limited efficacy. Discovering predictive molecular biomarkers to determine the probability of PVR development after retinal reattachment surgery will allow better patient stratification for more targeted drug evaluations. METHODS: Narrative literature review. RESULTS: We provide a summary of the inflammatory and fibrogenic factors found in ocular fluid samples during the development of retinal detachment and PVR and discuss their possible use as molecular PVR predictive biomarkers. CONCLUSIONS: Studies monitoring the levels of the above factors have found that few if any have predictive biomarker value, suggesting that widening the phenotype of potential factors and a combinatorial approach are required to determine predictive biomarkers for PVR. TRANSLATIONAL RELEVANCE: The identification of relevant biomarkers relies on an understanding of disease signaling pathways derived from basic science research. We discuss the extent to which those molecules identified as biomarkers and predictors of PVR relate to disease pathogenesis and could function as useful disease predictors. (http://www.umin.ac.jp/ctr/ number, UMIN000005604)