Research News

Thanks to the mammoth worldwide effort to collect genetic information on glaucoma patients, there’s been a major breakthrough with the discovery of several new gene variants associated with severe glaucoma. The latest discoveries double the number of genes found through earlier studies and lend hope that genetic screening can be used to identify and direct treatment for people at highest risk of losing their sight.

Scientists have for the first time identified molecules with the potential to block the accumulation of a toxic eye protein that can lead to early onset of glaucoma. Researchers have implicated a mutant form of a protein called myocilin as a possible root cause of this increased eye pressure.

It’s just been announced that Jeffrey Goldberg, MD, PhD, of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) will share a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) for a two-year project to develop whole-eye transplantation techniques in an animal model.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and other techniques are improving our ability to look deep inside the eye. Thanks to National Glaucoma Research funding, BrightFocus researchers are among those who have advanced new imaging methods, taking them from experimental stages to their new threshold, where they wait to become standard as clinical tools.

After years spent researching a protein linked to inherited forms of glaucoma, Raquel Lieberman, PhD, and her team at Georgia Tech have provided a three-dimensional view of that protein and a better understanding of what can happen when it becomes misshapen through genetic miscoding.

With the help of BrightFocus funding, Beatrice Yue, PhD, and colleagues have demonstrated that mutant forms of optineurin are associated with normal tension glaucoma (NTG) through a breakdown of the cell recycling machinery for protein (autophagy).