From the founder
Farida Adamu
For most of my life, I have lived with complex trauma to my right eye. Years of doctor visits and surgeries put me on a path toward correction, but I eventually learned that restoring and correcting vision was impossible; my brain had taught itself over time to rely less on my “weaker eye”.
I became curious about this and began researching my condition to understand it better and learn to live with it. I wondered about adult neuroplasticity, how the situation could have been different if it had been treated early. I had so many questions that needed answering.
I started seeking out those answers through as many research papers as I could find. While researching my condition, I also explored the data environment in ophthalmology. I have spent the last seven years working in analytics and data science, and have developed an instinct to explore everything through a data lens. This brought the challenges of vision research into sharp focus and gave birth to Macular.
Where We Are
We’re solving the immediate access problem to data in vision research. There are two critical data diversity gaps we identified: data types(most datasets in the field are images) and geography (predominantly Caucasian or Asian pool). Our MVP tackles the first challenge by providing anatomically precise synthetic datasets and virtual testing environments tailored for medical technology, accelerating R&D through early-stage prototyping, protocol refinement, and failure analysis without costly physical trials.
Where We’re Going
While synthetic datasets eliminate dependence on real patients or animals for testing, our ultimate vision is bigger. We aim to build a biobank on the African continent, which bears the most significant burden of eye disease and represents the most remarkable human genetic diversity. This project complements our synthetic work and enables longitudinal patient tracking, addressing another of the most persistent problems in eye disease research.
How You Can Help
Macular operates on an open model. Our datasets are freely available to everyone, without paywalls. We’re seeking collaborators who share our vision:
- Health and biotech startups building the future of medical technology, especially in eye disease research or vision science.
- Ophthalmologists and vision researchers advancing clinical understanding.
- Pharma teams developing generative discovery pipelines.
- AI researchers working on interpretability and bias reduction.
- Data Scientists and data geeks who just get it.