Age-related macular degeneration is a leading source of vision loss and affects millions of people worldwide. The work arising from this project has led to the development of new cell based reagents for the study of age-related macular degeneration which will help in our efforts to find treatments that reverse the course of retinal disease. Using these tools we have been able to generate stem cell derived retinal pigment epithelial cells which we are using to develop a drug screening platform to identify compounds that are protective to RPE cells.