Saving Sight: A Journey to Healing Without Scars

The research team aims to prevent glaucoma blindness by developing a safer and more effective therapy to prevent scarring after glaucoma surgery.

Glaucoma filtration surgery is performed to prevent ongoing vision loss from glaucoma. The current use of anti scarring cancer drugs carry serious long-term risks. This project aims to develop a more effective and safer alternative to improve long-term success of glaucoma surgery and to improve the quality of life for glaucoma patients worldwide.

The most innovative aspect of our proposal is that for the first time, gene sequencing is performed to compare the scarring genes between rabbit eye tissue and human eye tissue; this will establish whether the rabbit eye is a good model of glaucoma surgery scarring. Furthermore, in addition to targeting the traditional scarring pathway, DiOHF is unique in that it is a potent antioxidant, therefore it also suppresses scarring by the reduction of oxidative stress, thereby making it a potentially safer and more effective anti-scarring agent than what is currently available.

The immediate benefit of our project is the knowledge of whether the rabbit eye is a suitable research model for scarring eye diseases; this would benefit the research community who work in this space as the rabbit is commonly used for this purpose. If proven successful, the data provided by this work will deliver our research to the clinical trial stage. More globally, this project will tackle the immense challenge of postoperative scarring, which remains the main barrier to long-term success following all glaucoma operations.