Gavin and Ninetta Herbert will give $5 million to the Gavin Herbert Eye Institute to back retinal research in diseases that include glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy and retinal detachment.
The institute is part of UC Irvine Health, which oversees clinical, medical education and research work of the University of California-Irvine.
Herbert founded Allergan Inc. above his father’s drugstore in 1948. The company, now known as Allergan Plc, keeps an eye care and aesthetics medicine hub in Irvine that employs about 1,550.
The Herbert family has given or pledged at least $24 million to eye-care research at UCI, beginning with a $10 million gift from Gavin and his mother, Josephine Herbert Gleis, in 2007 to help start the institute.
The institute supports research and programs in eye care. Research areas include the development of an artificial cornea for patients with retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited degenerative eye disease that causes severe vision loss, and work on age-related dry macular degeneration, the loss of vision in the center of the eye.
—Sherry Hsieh
