By: SriniVas R. Sadda, MD, FARVO
SriniVas Sadda, MD, FARVO, discusses his paper on subretinal hyperreflective material (SHRM), its relevance to vision, and findings from the TENAYA and LUCERNE studies.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
I’m SriniVas Sadda, MD, FARVO, and I am professor of Ophthalmology at UCLA at the Doheny Eye Institute, and I had the great pleasure of presenting at ARVO 2026 a paper on subretinal hyperreflective material (SHRM) and its relevance to vision and how it performed in the TENAYA and LUCERNE studies. Now, this was a topic of great personal interest to me because my group was one of the first to identify — back in the time-domain OCT era almost 2 decades ago — the importance of this material. And in fact, in those days, we called it subretinal tissue, and we found it to be the most important predictor in terms of visual outcomes, which kind of makes sense because it is material that is located between the photoreceptors and the RPE. And since that time, it’s been renamed. We know there are a number of different potential sources for subretinal hyperreflective material, but importantly, type 2 neovascularization is located in the subretinal space as is subretinal hemorrhage, and these kinds of materials can ultimately lead to the development of fibrosis.