Honoring Mary Tyler Moore by creating a world without visual loss from diabetes!

Mary Tyler Moore was a brilliantly talented, intelligent, independent woman. A beloved and renowned actress, dancer, and savvy media executive, Mary was a trailblazer and door-opener for women. Her professional persona was one of grace, determination, and unbreakable optimism (she had “spunk”).

She also lived with type 1 diabetes (T1D).

For 30+ years, Mary was a voice to the fears and hopes of people with diabetes and helped JDRF raise billions of dollars for research to cure T1D and its complications.

As she worked tirelessly to relieve the burdens of T1D for others, the disease impacted her own life, eventually resulting in near-blindness from Diabetic Retinal Disease and ultimately, stealing her autonomy and joy.

The Challenge: Vision Loss from Diabetic Retinal Disease

Sadly, Mary’s story is hardly unique.

Diabetic Retinal Disease (DRD) is the number one cause of blindness in working-age adults worldwide. Globally, more than 50 million people suffer from vision-threatening DRD.

While Mary did not make it to see a cure, The Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative, which seeks to PRESERVE and RESTORE vision in people with diabetes, continues Mary’s vital work as it honors her legacy.

Capitalizing on today’s highly-advanced biomedical technologies and tools, the Initiative seeks to create a world without vision loss from DRD by working across the entire therapy development and access pipeline.

Our efforts include:

• Understanding the full spectrum of the disease’s impact on those who live with it—at 40+ years old, the existing severity scale for DRD is outdated and incorrectly focuses only on the vascular component, ignoring nerve, visual function, quality-of-life, and other components of the disease.
• Establishing a cutting-edge human eye tissue biobank exclusively for DRD research. The biobank will have impeccably preserved and stored samples that can be shared with collaborating researchers around the world, and are suitable for advanced analysis to give insights into the cellular and molecular basis of DRD.
• Organizing a public-private consortium to use the data generated by research undertaken by biobank collaborating scientists to identify new molecular targets for therapeutics development. This will accelerate design, testing, and delivery of new treatments to preserve and restore vision in people with diabetes.
• Creating and sustaining a comprehensive digital image library with millions of retinal images matched with health records that can help support research, improve criteria for diagnosis, and identify new opportunities for therapy development and improved clinical care.
• Fostering real-time information sharing and collaboration among top global experts in academia, pharma, and clinical care.
• Improving prospects for regulatory approval of new therapies.
• Advancing the standard of care for people with diabetes through new methods to PRESERVE and RESTORE visual function.

The Initiative is a joint effort of JDRF, The Mary Tyler Moore and S. Robert Levine, MD Charitable Foundation, and the Elizabeth Weiser Caswell Diabetes Institute (CDI) at the University of Michigan. Several CDI researchers are also supported by the JDRF Center of Excellence at the University of Michigan. 

Help Us Advance toward a World without DRD:

Donate today to help PRESERVE and RESTORE vision for people with diabetes. Click the blue “Donate” button. 

Interested in stock donation? Learn how-to with JDRF’s stock donation resource page.

Mail Checks to:
JDRF
Attn: The Mary Tyler Moore Vison Initiative
1480 Highway 9, North, Suite 306
Woodbridge, NJ 07095

Other ways to contribute please email dallasch@umich.edu

For more information, please visit marytylermoore.org