A team of researchers from Northwestern University has received a $56 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop and test vision-restoring whole-eye transplants. The funding will support a six-year effort to create new technologies, including visible-light optical coherence tomography (vis-OCT), to analyze eyeballs before transplant surgery.
Led by Northwestern engineers Hao F. Zhang and Cheng Sun, the team will focus on addressing the most common causes of irreversible vision loss, such as retinal neurodegeneration caused by diseases like glaucoma and macular degeneration. They aim to determine how to regenerate a functional optic nerve, which connects the eye to the brain.
The project is part of ARPA-H’s Transplantation of Human Eye Allografts (THEA) program, which seeks to revolutionize eye transplantation and develop breakthroughs in neuroscience and medicine. With 40 scientists and medical experts from across the US, the team will advance cutting-edge medical devices, artificial intelligence integrations, new surgical techniques, and generative medicine breakthroughs.
While transplants are common in ophthalmology, current methods do not address the root causes of irreversible vision loss. The THEA program aims to fill this gap by developing new technologies to promote optic nerve regeneration and retinal neuron survival. The researchers believe that their work will lead to more accessible treatments, including new drugs, gene therapies, and devices, for patients with eye diseases like glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy.
Source: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/12/vision-restoring-project-receives-up-to-56-million-to-fast-track-development