Patient Care Spotlight: Ocular Oncology
Ocular oncology is a specialty within ophthalmology that deals with diagnosing and treating tumors on the surface and inside of the eye. Eye cancer can affect any structure in the eye and can be challenging to diagnose.
The Department of Ophthalmology is fortunate to have the expertise of Associate Professor Andrew Stacey, MD. He runs the only full-service ocular oncology unit in the WWAMI region (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho). He sees patients at the UW Medicine Eye Institute at Harborview and the Ophthalmology Clinic at Seattle Children’s.
After the tumor is diagnosed, treating it often requires a team from many medical specialties outside of Ophthalmology. Dr. Stacey teams with pediatricians, medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, and interventional radiologists at UW, Fred Hutch, and Seattle Children’s.
“There are two main options when treating eye cancers such as ocular melanoma,” Dr. Stacey said. “One is a surgical option, and the other is radiation. We have all modalities available at UW. For many patients, proton beam radiotherapy is used. It is a focused radiation beam that can treat the cancer precisely, limiting damage to the surrounding ocular structures.”
In 2015, the University of Washington created a first-of-its-kind proton beam and has now treated 400 patients. “Our innovations at UW have allowed modern proton beams to be applied to ocular tumors,” he said.
Learn more about proton therapy for eye cancer in this video.
Dr. Stacey has developed a highly collaborative network of eye cancer specialists worldwide who share information and expertise to benefit patients.
Working with Ophthalmology faculty colleagues Professors Aaron and Cecilia Lee, Dr. Stacey is using AI to create an open-source, international eye cancer image library that makes that data accessible to researchers. Currently, 15 sites from four countries are enrolled, with over 3,000 images from 857 unique melanomas.
“We are just at the beginning, but the power of collaborative databases is real,” Dr. Stacey says.
Stacey’s effort includes creating an international network to bridge the global disparities in treatment for retinoblastoma, an eye cancer that affects children and often goes untreated in lower-income areas. Stacey and his colleagues worldwide have demonstrated the global disparity in outcomes of children with retinoblastoma for the first time. They have shown that children from low-income countries present to the hospital later and have worse outcomes than children from higher-income countries. Their research has also led to numerous publications on topics such as the effect of national income on the lag time between the onset of signs and symptoms and referral to a retinoblastoma center, the global gender disparity in the diagnosis of retinoblastoma, and elucidating factors that lead to families abandoning care for children with retinoblastoma.
Locally, Dr. Stacey and colleagues in the Department of Ophthalmology and the School of Medicine are working on improving diagnostics and therapeutics for retinoblastoma, developing non-invasive maternal testing for the disease, and gene-based treatments.
Dr. Stacey joined the faculty in 2016. He grew up in Northeast Ohio and earned a bachelor’s and master's degree in statistics at Brigham Young University, where he was also a linebacker on the football team. During college, he took two years off school and athletics to volunteer for his church in northern Italy.
He earned his medical degree from Ohio State University and completed his ophthalmology residency at the University of Michigan Kellogg Eye Center. He then completed a fellowship in ocular oncology at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, U.K.
Dr. Stacey lives in Seattle with his wife and four children. In his free time, he enjoys running, mountain biking, fly fishing, volunteering at his church, and being in the mountains with his family.
