Trabecular Meshwork Study Club is one of many gatherings devoted to outflow research. It was conceived in the late 1990s by Dave Epstein and John Samples during their annual visits to the American Society for Cell Biology. In fact, the idea was born at the Starbucks on Mission Street, next to the Moscone Conference Center.
Dave developed his interest in glaucoma while working with Morton Grant at the Howe Laboratory at Harvard. John’s background traces back to neurobiology. He was John E. Dowling’s fellow at Woods Hole in 1973, and earlier, a graduate student of Donald Kennedy at Stanford. Notably, Dowling himself had been a graduate student of George Wald, who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1967. ARVO’s honor fundraising society is named the Dowling Society in recognition of his contributions, he was a major supporter of ARVO.
Back in the late ’90s, Dave hosted a now-legendary “three-slide only” meeting on the East Coast. Meanwhile, John, then at Oregon Health Science, and Shan Lin at UC San Francisco launched a similar glaucoma-focused meeting in San Francisco, without the three-slide limit. Shan worked with Jorge Alvarado on the pathophysiology of outflow resistance in cultured meshwork cells and later developed fetal stem cells for replenishing the cells lost in glaucoma. He became the Director of Glaucoma at UC San Francisco.
The Meshwork Society meeting began in 2001 and soon expanded into a parallel clinical meeting held in Napa under the UC San Francisco banner. Dave Epstein was a loyal member of the annual Meshwork meeting, even as he served as the busy Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at Duke.
Those early Napa meetings became famous not only for their content but for their context – wine tasting at the breaks was part of the experience. That kind of thing would be impossible under today’s regulations, but to this day, John continues to bring good wine to the Trabecular Meshwork meetings whenever he can.
The essence of the Trabecular Meshwork meeting is its independence. It is not an academic, CME-accredited, or institutionally audited conference. The goal is simple: to foster meaningful progress through informal, in-depth dialogue, whether via white papers, collaborative projects, or discussions before, during, and after the event. Some of this work is captured in a series of hardbound books published by Simon Bakker at Kugler Publications, which serve as lasting references. Photos contributed by Dr. Gong and Dr. Johnstone from these publications are frequently used in teaching materials as they are exceptional tools for illustrating outflow anatomy to students.
A concurrent webinar series—offered at no charge and held six times a year—is organized by Colleen McDowell and Dan Stamer and hosted by Duke. This series has featured outstanding presentations and is generously supported by the BrightFocus Foundation. A full list of sponsors can be found here.
One of the early goals of the West Coast meeting was to encourage “meshworkers” to attend the American Society for Cell Biology, even offering to fund their participation. Dave and John believed that the science at ASCB was far ahead of what was typically found in ophthalmology at the time. Depending on the financial status of our non-profit, this is something we may continue to support.
The meeting itself was modeled in part on the Gordon Conferences, and also on similar retreats held at Stanford’s Fallen Leaf Lodge in South Lake Tahoe. From 2000 to 2005, it gradually evolved into a more structured format. A not-for-profit 501(c)(3) foundation, the Western Glaucoma Foundaton now provides on-going financial support. Meeting size is deliberately kept in the 40–55 range, as this scale is ideal for fostering collaboration. Whenever possible, the foundation covers travel and lodging—especially for young investigators.