Science News

The National Eye Institute is exploring efforts to restore sight, including ways to protect retinal cells from damage, replace or regrow optic nerve tissue, and develop whole-eye transplant techniques.

International collaboration is vital to conquering Alzheimer’s disease. At our recent event, U.S. and Dutch researchers exchanged promising ideas and heard from the leaders who are shaping solutions in each of our countries.

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).

In two studies receiving international attention, 2013-16 BrightFocus grantee Rik Ossenkoppele, PhD, of Vrije Universiteit (VU) Medical Center, Amsterdam, and colleagues in the Netherlands have lent confidence to our understanding of how Alzheimer’s develops. Their findings help confirm that amyloid beta (Aβ) peptide levels start to build up and aggregate long before Alzheimer’s symptoms develop, and are predictive of disease.

Read about the success from an early clinical trial of the Alzheimer’s drug, aducanumab.

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.

Good news from Yale—researchers there report early success using a still-experimental cancer drug known as saracatinib to treat Alzheimer’s disease in mice.