Investigating the pathogenetic mechanisms leading to glaucoma surgery failure & development of new targeted therapeutics

Glaucoma is a major health problem and blinds millions of people worldwide. Glaucoma surgery is used to prevent blindness but traditional glaucoma surgery (trabeculectomy) fails primarily due to scarring in 50% of patients after 5-years of follow-up. There has been an unexpected paradigm shift in the types of glaucoma surgeries performed worldwide.

New surgical techniques, called minimally invasive glaucoma surgery, have been developed in glaucoma in the last few years, and is replacing trabeculectomy surgery worldwide. Similar to trabeculectomy, the new surgical techniques also fail due to scarring and have an even higher failure rate of 50% after 1-year of follow-up.

I will use new powerful technologies to investigate why a large subgroup of patients develops severe scarring and irreversible loss of vision after glaucoma surgery (trabeculectomy and minimally invasive glaucoma surgery). Using this knowledge, I will develop new treatments to prevent this from happening.