Foundation Fighting Blindness

The foundation's venture-philanthropy arm, the Retinal Degeneration Fund (RD Fund), is managed by a dedicated investment team led by Managing Director Rusty Kelley. The RD Fund operates with its own investment committee separate from the foundation's research grants team, though strategic alignment with the foundation's scientific mission is maintained through shared advisory boards (per the RD Fund's published structure).

The foundation sources investment opportunities through its deep academic network and clinical consortium. Its My Retina Tracker Registry, with over 25,000 genotyped patients, identifies high-potential drug targets and provides biotech startups with clinical-trial recruitment partners before a Series A round is even raised. Academic investigators funded by the foundation's grants often form the companies in which the RD Fund later invests.

It is both. The foundation awards traditional research grants through its scientific program, while the separate Retinal Degeneration Fund (RD Fund) makes equity investments in early-stage companies. This dual structure allows the foundation to de-risk science through grants and then capture returns through equity when those discoveries advance toward clinical applications.

The RD Fund focuses primarily on seed and Series A investments in biotech companies developing therapies for inherited retinal diseases. It occasionally participates in later-stage rounds for portfolio companies advancing through clinical trials, but its core mandate is to provide the first institutional capital that bridges academic proof-of-concept and IND-enabling studies.

The RD Fund is a wholly controlled subsidiary of the Foundation Fighting Blindness but operates with an independent management team and investment committee. Profits from successful exits are recycled into the foundation's research mission, creating a self-reinforcing funding model. Patient-advocacy and community events remain under the main foundation's 501(c)(3) umbrella and are not financed by investment returns.

The foundation is primarily funded by individual donations, chapter fundraising events, and corporate sponsorships. The Gund family provided foundational early support, but the organization has diversified over five decades into a broad network of donors. Investment returns from the RD Fund represent a replenishing capital source that flows back into the grant-making program.

Yes. The foundation coordinates a clinical consortium that standardizes natural-history studies across trial sites in the US and Europe. Combined with the My Retina Tracker patient registry, this infrastructure allows pharma partners and RD Fund portfolio companies to identify eligible trial participants rapidly — a capability that meaningfully compresses clinical-trial timelines for rare-disease indications.