Research News

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).

An international research collaboration has uncovered some clues to macular degeneration’s onset, namely, the discovery of a microscopic mineral “scaffolding” around which drusen deposits—a hallmark sign of the early stages of age-related macular degeneration (AMD)—begin to form.

BrightFocus-funded Dr. Maya Koronyo-Hamaoui is the senior author on a groundbreaking publication that reported the ACE protein, which can increase blood pressure to dangerous levels in the body’s blood stream, can actually help to clear beta-amyloid in the brain by stimulating the immune system.

Experts have long recognized that the number of deaths from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) tends to be underreported. Now a new study published in Neurology attempts to quantify that under-reporting and projects the AD mortality rate to be five to six times higher than official estimates, suggesting that AD may be responsible for more than 500,000 annual deaths in the United States.

A group of researchers based at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have shown that when cardiovascular risk factors (CVRF) such as elevated glucose and high blood pressure begin in early adulthood, they are associated with significantly worse cognitive function in middle age compared with having no CVRF.