Choroideremia Research Foundation Awards Alice Y. Zhang, MD, the 6th Annual Randy Wheelock Research Award
Neal Bench, CRF President, awarding Alice Zhang, MD and colleagues the 2025 Randy Wheelock Award at UNC-Chapel Hill.
CRF honors Dr. Alice Y. Zhang with the 6th Annual Randy Wheelock Research Award for advancing patient-focused outcomes in choroideremia research.
SPRINGFIELD, MA, UNITED STATES, October 21, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Choroideremia Research Foundation (CRF) is proud to announce that Alice Y. Zhang, MD, Associate Professor and Residency Program Director in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been selected as the recipient of the 6th Annual Randy Wheelock Research Award. This prestigious award recognizes emerging leaders in ophthalmic research who are making significant contributions to the understanding and treatment of choroideremia (CHM) and related vision loss conditions.
Introduced in 2020, the Randy Wheelock Award celebrates the decades-long advocacy of its namesake to find treatment or a cure for CHM. As CRF’s Chief Advisor for Research and Therapy Development, Randy Wheelock was an integral part of the organization’s achievements over the years. He collaborated with researchers and other rare disease groups to leverage assets and scientific knowledge in search of treatment options and a cure for CHM.
Zhang’s research focuses on the development and validation of patient-reported outcome measures that more accurately capture meaningful changes in visual function for individuals with CHM. With the support of the $50,000 award, Zhang aims to advance the field by establishing more sensitive and meaningful measures of success in future therapeutic trials.
In a statement, Zhang expressed her gratitude for the award:
“Our team is very grateful to the Choroideremia Research Foundation for this grant. This award provides crucial support for advancing our understanding of how patients experience vision loss in choroideremia. By validating patient-reported outcomes, we hope to lay the groundwork for more sensitive and meaningful measures of success in future therapeutic trials.” (Source: UNC-Chapel Hill)
Past Wheelock Award Winners:
2020 Kim Edwards
2021 Cynthia Qian, MD, FRCSC, DABO
2022 Bhanu Telugu, DVM, PhD
2023 Luisa de Lemos, PhD
2024 Shalhevet Izraeli
The Choroideremia Research Foundation is committed to supporting innovative research that brings hope to individuals affected by CHM, accelerates the development of effective treatments, and works toward a cure.
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About Choroideremia
Choroideremia (CHM) is a rare inherited form of blindness affecting approximately 1 in 50,000 people. Due to its X-linked inheritance pattern, males are most severely affected, with females usually experiencing much milder visual impairment. Symptoms begin in early childhood, with night blindness and restriction of visual field being the earliest noticeable effects, eventually progressing to complete blindness. An estimated 6,000 people in the United States and 10,000 in the European Union are impacted by choroideremia. There are currently no approved treatments for choroideremia. For more information, visit curechm.org/#choroideremia
About the Choroideremia Research Foundation Inc.
The Choroideremia Research Foundation was founded in 2000 as an international fundraising and patient advocacy organization to stimulate research on CHM. Since its inception, the CRF has provided approximately $6 million in research awards and is the largest financial supporter of CHM research worldwide. Research funded by the CRF has led to the development of a CHM animal model, the pre-clinical production of gene therapy vectors currently in clinical trials, and the CRF Biobank which stores tissue and stem cell samples donated by CHM patients. For more information, or to make a donation to support research, visit curechm.org
Reagan Devinney
Choroideremia Research Foundation Inc
+1 800-210-0233
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