Research to Prevent Blindness’ mission and leadership makes the eyecare of today—and tomorrow—possible.
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Dry eye is a chronic medical condition that develops when the eye's tear film does not lubricate and protect the eye's outer surface.
Bryan William Jones
Stephen H. Tsang
Isabella Gomes
I am a retinal neuroscientist. My scientific work involves understanding the topology of neural circuitry, and what the evolution of neural circuitry can teach us about information processing. Understanding how we perceive the world through neural circuits involved in vision is compelling enough. But understanding how those circuits are altered in disease like retinitis pigmentosa, glaucoma, and age-related macular degeneration drives the work.
Bryan William Jones, PhD, recipient of the RPB Stein Innovation Award, RPB International Research Collaborators Award and RPB Career Development Award
Professor of Ophthalmology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
My journey into vision science and ophthalmology began decades ago, thanks to the invaluable support of an RPB Medical Student Fellowship, followed by the RPB-AUPO-Bernard Becker start-up award. Today, as a geneticist specializing in retinal degenerations, it is a true honor to lend my expertise to RPB’s Scientific Advisory Panel.
Stephen H. Tsang, MD, PhD, multi-RPB awardee and current member of the RPB Scientific Advisory Panel
Laszlo Z. Bito Professor of Ophthalmology, and Pathology and Cell Biology, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
To have the honor of RPB’s support with this research fellowship is invaluable to my research in inherited retinal disease. I’m thrilled to be exploring the impact of mutations on CRX’s regulatory function, so that we may better understand the hidden connections between genetic variations and the clinical presentation of retinopathies.
Isabella Gomes, MPH, MA, recipient of the RPB Medical Student Eye Research Fellowship
Medical Student, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine
RPB funding has been associated with almost every major breakthrough in vision science in the past six decades.
In 2007, RPB-supported researchers restored vision in three young adults with Leber’s congenital amaurosis, an inherited retinal disease. Less than 10 years later, RPB-supported researchers and physicians administered the first FDA-approve gene therapy for inherited blindness; in just weeks, the patient (a 13-year-old boy), had significant improvements in his vision.
In 2014, RPB-supported labs announce the development of light-sensitive retinas-in-a-dish, derived from patient skin and blood cells, that can be used to test patient-specific treatments for retinal disorders.
Since 2014, research using retinal organoids has exploded. Retinal organoids offer researchers the ability to study eye diseases using actual human tissue (rather than animal models), so that the research conducted is more relevant to human disease.
Further expanding the models available to study eye disease, in 2022, RPB-supported researchers published a study in Nature showing that they revived light-sensing neuron cells in organ donor eyes, opening up new research avenues using human donor eyes.
The researchers restored communication between these cells as part of a series of discoveries that stand to transform both brain and vision research. They are continuing to advance this research.
The federal government is, as of 2024, investing in this area of research as part of its Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) program, Transplantation of Human Eye Allografts, which is designed to support transformational health research; in this case, it seeks to answer the question, “What if we could cure blindness?”