Research News

An experimental drug, consisting of cells manufactured and implanted in the eye to stimulate optic nerve growth and activity, could be an entirely new way of fighting glaucoma.

Jeffrey Goldberg, MD, PhD, a BrightFocus grantee answers questions about an exciting new clinical trial for glaucoma.

BrightFocus is funding a clinical trial to try to fight glaucoma with a new drug implanted in the eye that may protect the optic nerve.

Research funded by BrightFocus Foundation could lead to new drugs and therapies that prevent vision loss in glaucoma more effectively than pressure-lowering treatments alone.

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.