Matthew Van Hook, PhD, assistant professor in the UNMC Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, has received a $150,000 grant from Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB), which will fund a two-year study on the breakdown between the eyes and the brain during glaucoma.
The grant, an RPB/The Glaucoma Foundation Career Advancement Award, will be used to explore the way connections from the eye to the brain break down during glaucoma — the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide, Dr. Van Hook said.
“Glaucoma is related to the degeneration of neurons within the eye, specifically retinal ganglion cells. They make connections from the eyes to the visual centers of the brain,” Dr. Van Hook said. “During this disease, the function of those connections breaks down, and we think that contributes to the process of blindness – not just the degeneration of the neurons, but the loss of the connection and the disruption of visual information going from the retina to parts of the brain.”
The grant, one of only five that were granted this year, will help Dr. Van Hook build on his first National Institutes of Health R01 grant, which looked at the time course and mechanism of that degeneration process.
Click here to read more about “The RPB – TGF Career Advancement Award in Glaucoma Research”
Recent Research Grants
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