 Next up, I'd like to welcome Joshua Chu Tan. He's from the ANU College of Medicine, Biology, and the Environment. And the title of his three-minute thesis presentation tonight is Targeting the Root of Vision Loss. If I asked everyone here to think about the one sense that you couldn't live without, I'm willing to bet that most of you would have immediately thought of your sight. That's because our vision and what we see plays such an integral role in how we perceive the world around us. Now the tissue responsible for that is known as the retina. But what if I told you a specific part of your retina was to slowly damage as you age? What if this part of your retina was responsible for your color perception as well as your central vision? And then this damage leads to your visual field looking like this. Well, this is exactly what happens in age-related macular degeneration, or AMD. This disease is the leading cause of blindness in the developed world. This disease costs the Australian economy up to $5 billion per year. And the most common form of this disease has no cure. AMD is a serious problem. Now due to the many factors that are at play, therapies are very hard to come by. But I'm researching a potential gene therapy using tiny molecules called microRNA that are like the gods of gene regulation and have the ability to bypass this problem. How? Because a single microRNA can bind to multiple targets. So instead of controlling just the one gene, we're controlling its entire pathway. Instead of superficially cutting just the stem of the weed, we're ripping out the whole root. So in the case of AMD, we know that the inflammatory pathway plays a major role. So we've injected an anti-inflammatory microRNA into the eye, and what we saw was a decrease in genes responsible for inflammation, cell death, as well as a slowing in the damage progression of the retina. What we've now done is identified multiple microRNA that can each regulate pathways leading to AMD, and by injecting a cocktail of these molecules, we can slow the progression of the disease and hopefully halt vision loss. Now I want everyone to look at this image again. Imagine living the rest of your life with vision like this. So the next time you're with your loved ones, study their faces, their every feature. Commit that to memory. Cherish that image because one in seven of you will lose that ability if nothing is done about this disease. With the use of microRNA, my hope and my goal is that for millions of people, this image can become clear. Thank you.