Meet Dr. Stamer and Learn About His Lab’s Mission to Prevent Blindness

BrightFocus National Glaucoma Research grantee Daniel Stamer talks about his research into the causes of glacuoma.

Transcript
I was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona where I was working as a technician with the eye bank, and I was introduced into this project that was trying to understand how to better treat steroid induced glaucoma. And that’s a type of glaucoma that’s quite common whereby somebody would be on steroids for whatever reason a good number of people about 30% will get elevated eye pressure because of that, and we still don’t know all the mechanisms of how that’s happening and we don’t have a specific treatment for that type of glaucoma, and it’s become more and more prevalent because the steroids that are being used are more powerful and so the project that I have right now is taking advantage some some cutting edge technology that was introduced maybe 5 years ago it’s called single-cell RNA sequencing and it’s whereby you can um discover the signature of genes and proteins that are being turned on and off in different cell types in the eye. And then specifically there’s a protective gene in glaucoma. It actually protects you from steroid induced glaucoma. So it must have some role but we don’t understand it fully. And this project is using single cell to try and understand how that particular gene it’s called an PTL1 what role it plays in start induced glaucoma.