VEGFA and age-related macular degeneration: Additionally, while many GWAS loci harbor genes that have been implicated in AMD, such as VEGFA, which encodes the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) protein that is targeted by three current treatments for AMD (Gragoudas et al., 2004, Heier et al., 2012, Rosenfeld et al., 2006), the causal risk variant and the mechanism of increased disease risk is not known.