David A. Newsome, MD, a long time member of ARVO and Senior Vice President of Research and Development for Adeona Pharmaceuticals, Inc., passed away on Thursday, February 24, 2011. Dr. Newsome invented and developed ZincMonoCysteine and was the first person to pioneer and demonstrate the benefits of oral high dose zinc therapy in age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in older Americans. Oral high dose zinc containing nutritional products now represents the standard of care for age-related macular degeneration which affects over 10 million Americans. He also found that the eye's pigmented retina, a type of covering or epithelial tissue, could produce some types of collagen. His findings came when it was thought that epithelial tissues either could not (or did not) produce collagen. His new observations opened a new field of investigation of the collagen and related structural molecules in the eye and other tissues.

He was also a very active philanthropist. Dr. Newsome founded the Meals On Wheels New Orleans Fund. He contributed globally by founding Eye Care Haiti, headquartered in Port-au-Prince. This organization has added multiple rural clinics in addition to the operating suites and training programs in the capital city.

During his career, Dr. Newsome spent over a decade in clinical and laboratory research at the National Eye Institute, becoming the Head of the Retinal Disease Section. As Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute, Dr. Newsome combined teaching and clinical work with his laboratory research. Dr. Newsome continued his passion of teaching, patient care, clinical and laboratory research as a full tenured Professor at Louisiana State University Medical School, New Orleans. After teaching there, Dr. Newsome formed his own surgical and medical retina disease private practice, and continued to perform clinical and laboratory research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and private foundation grants. After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Dr. Newsome worked as a surgical ophthalmologist until joining the management team at Adeona in 2006. He earned an M.D. from Columbia University and a B.A. from Duke University, and completed an ophthalmology residency and a fellowship in retinal diseases and surgery at Harvard University. He also completed a retinal fellowship at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, University of Miami.

*Information contributed by Adeona*