Dr. Shelley Boyd is an ophthalmologist & clinician-scientist focused on “dry” Age Related Macular Degeneration (AMD). She is an Assistant Professor with the University of Toronto in the Department of Ophthalmology & Vision Sciences (DOVS) and Laboratory Medicine & Pathobiology (LMP) and is cross-appointed to Biomedical Engineering at McMaster University. She is the founding director of Canada’s only dedicated “High Risk Dry AMD Clinic”, a clinical research facility at St. Michael’s Hospital, where she uses specialized imaging and a patient-centered registry to understand and compare the different subtypes of dry AMD. Working within the Keenan Research Centre of Biomedical Science at St. Michael’s Hospital, her lab focuses on finding new therapies for this blinding disease. Dry AMD effects 85% of patients with late disease and no treatments exist.
Dr. Boyd was previously Head of the Ocular Angiogenesis research program, world-wide, for Novartis pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) where she led the pre-clinical and translational aspects of the Lucentis program, the standard-of-care treatment for “wet” AMD. Working with St. Michael’s Hospital – and with the goal of turning science into medicine – she recently founded a biotech company, Translatum Medicus inc (TMi), that uniquely combines her background in science, medicine and the pharmaceutical industry with the hospital’s mission to be leaders in knowledge translation. Dr. Boyd is President and Chief Scientific Officer of TMi.