Glaucoma is the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide, affecting an estimated 80 million people. Yet, much about how the disease impacts the eye is still unknown. Preethi Ganapathy, MD/PhD, will use her experience creating 3D models of optic nerve cells to better understand how the cells react to interocular pressure (IOP), a common cause of nerve damage in glaucoma patients.

Using a $2.1 mil grant from the National Eye Institute, Ganapathy hopes to identify new targets to prevent vision loss caused by glaucoma.  Ganapathy is an assistant professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences in Upstate’s Center for Vision Research.

Ganapathy has seen first-hand how this research could help patients. “We've spent decades treating glaucoma by lowering IOP with eye drops or with surgery. The problem is that we don't understand the relationship between IOP and glaucoma.” Perplexingly, optic nerve sensitivity to intraocular pressure varies widely across individuals.

“I’ve always been fascinated by how some people can live with high eye pressures their whole lives, but others develop glaucoma at normal pressures,” says Ganapathy. “One person’s nerve may be more or less sensitive to pressure than another’s.”

"I'm particularly heartened to receive this funding in the current climate,” she says. “We hope that this NIH investment will lead us to find out what drives optic nerve sensitivity to IOP, so we can target that system to keep the optic nerve healthy even if IOP is elevated. This takes decades of work and funding, and we are very excited to begin this important work.”

Finding out what mechanism regulates this sensitivity to IOP could be the key to developing better treatments for glaucoma patients, explains Ganapathy.

“I am a clinician-scientist and surgeon, and I take care of glaucoma patients. I'm convinced that this grant will help us investigate key questions in glaucoma that will help patients maintain vision. I'm excited that this proposal stemmed from my K08 clinician-scientist training grant to develop 3D models of the optic nerve. Getting an R01 funded by the NIH is external validation that the work we are doing is important and timely.”

You can read more about how Ganapathy’s lab is creating 3D models to better study causes of vision loss here.

For more on the work of Upstate’s Center for Vision Research, visit their site- https://www.upstate.edu/cvr