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Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine hope to develop new glaucoma therapies by testing human neurons and a regenerative therapy to rescue dying visual neurons.
They’ve received a new five year, US$2 million grant from the National Eye Institute for the project.
Lead investigator Dr Tasneem Sharma said “current treatment options only include reducing elevated pressure in the eye, but these treatments only slow the disease rather than prevent it, so patients still progress toward vision loss”.
Dr Sharma’s project, called “Therapeutic Intervention to Target Human Glaucoma Pathogenesis”, focusses on providing a foundation for developing a new glaucoma therapeutic by testing human neurons and a regenerative therapy to rescue visual neurons from dying preclinically in human eyes under glaucoma conditions. This combination has never been used before.
“It is crucial to identify therapies and develop new treatments for glaucoma that can save retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) from neurodegeneration,” Dr Sharma said.
“This grant will be instrumental in spearheading our research on validating an innovative therapeutic strategy for glaucoma. Our powerful tools and valuable stem cell resources will have enormous potential for breakthrough discovery. It will offer a foundation for deciphering survival and regeneration of RGCs due to glaucomatous neurodegeneration.”
She hopes the results of this research project will lead to new clinical trials for glaucoma patients to study the effectiveness of potential new treatments.
People of African ancestry are five times as likely as others to develop glaucoma and up to 15 times as likely to be blinded by the condition, but most research has used data from people of European ancestry.
We are inviting individuals who have accessed eyecare services previously to participate in a focus group discussion so that we can better understand what good eye care means to the patient.
Researchers have developed a gene therapy that has lowered intraocular pressure (IOP) in animal models, suggesting that glaucoma can be readily treated with gene therapy–based methods, paving the way for deployment in clinical trials.