Tarsus Pharmaceuticals chief medical officer talks AI in eye care

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Eye doctors are the first line of defense for the 2+ billion people worldwide with vision impairment.

The reasons for vision trouble are as varied as each person’s lens prescription: age-related decline, cataracts, and even diabetes can lead to issues. Every year brings new data, drugs, surgical techniques, and technology to help create personalized solutions for each patient.

To find out more about the field, we sat down with Elizabeth Yeu, an ophthalmologist who has been chief medical officer of biopharma Tarsus Pharmaceuticals since November 2024.

Most of the company’s revenue comes from a prescription eye drop treatment, Xdemvy, approved by the FDA in 2023 to treat a common inflammatory eyelid condition called demodex blepharitis. Tarsus is also working on developing drugs for ocular rosacea, Lyme disease, and malaria.

Yeu shared her thoughts on her role at Tarsus as well as the role AI and big data can play in the future of eye care.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What do you do in your role as chief medical officer?

A chief medical officer can be so different from company to company, and it really depends on what company you’re joining. Specific to Tarsus itself, [in] my role as chief medical officer, I’m the voice of the eye surgeon and the voice of the subject matter expert within eye care.

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

The most fulfilling aspect of my work is witnessing the real-world impact our therapies have on patients and the eye care community. It’s deeply meaningful to know that something we’ve developed is now helping individuals who, in many cases, have struggled for years.

What healthcare trend are you most optimistic about?

One of my biggest subspecialty areas is refractive cataract surgery. Creating more of that precision for cataract surgery patients, some of it is very arithmetic. We’re using different diagnostic tools to capture pictures and measurements to calculate patients’ proper lens power.

But that only allows for—only, quote, unquote—95% accuracy.

If we can take big data [and] compile that, we can then get that much more accurate and precise from not only a diagnostic perspective but we could also utilize the power of robotics…to help us as a tool when we are taking care of our patients, even at the time of surgery.

We can take those who are average surgeons…and make them all great surgeons. And we can take the 85% or 90% of accuracy and turn that closer to everyone having those outcomes that we would want. That’s the power of what big data and artificial intelligence and having automation and the tools within our hands could do from start to finish. I would say that we’re probably within 10 years away.

What healthcare trend are you least optimistic about?

I’m concerned about the shrinking pipeline of ophthalmologists entering the field. We’re seeing more physicians retire than new ones entering residency. At the same time, patient needs are growing dramatically—with an aging population, the number of eye related procedures is expected to increase significantly in the next 5–10 years, making the need for ophthalmology expertise even more critical.