Department News

Pearle Vision Foundation awards Haohua Qian, PhD, for novel diabetic retinopathy research

The leading cause of blindness in working adults, 20 to 74 years old, is caused by diabetic retinopathy, a common complication of diabetes. However, no effective cures or preventative measures currently exist for this condition, which affects 12,000 to 24,000 Americans every year. As diabetes reaches global epidemic proportions, touching 230 million people in 2005 alone, the disease will continue to levy high economic costs and risks to patients and their families.

Haohua Qian, Ph.D., is proposing a new path to prevent or delay the onset of retinopathy-associated diabetic disease, and was recently awarded approximately $25,000 by the Pearle Vision Foundation to pursue his “Developing a Novel Approach to Prevent Hypoxia in Diabetic Retina” project.
“The award not only provides needed financial support for the project, it also validates the importance of this study in the field of diabetes research by colleagues and by the community,” says Dr. Qian, the Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Neuroscience Research Laboratory, for the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences.

For several years, his research team has been investigating neuronal aspects of diabetic retinopathy. But at the beginning of this year, Dr. Qian’s team set off in a new direction to develop novel mechanisms to prevent diabetic retinopathy, which this award was based on.

“We hope the findings we will gain in this project will enable us to develop this line of study as the main research area in my laboratory, and to secure additional funding sources such as NIH [National Institutes of Health],” says Qian.

Essentially, his project will use GABA (the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain and retina) receptors as tools to affect the retina’s cell activity. They will also alleviate retinal hypoxia—a shortage of oxygen in the body—by re-establishing a proper balance between the inner retinal blood supply and the metabolic demand of retinal neurons. It is generally believed that hypoxia in retinal tissue plays an important role in diabetic retinopathy, notes Dr. Qian. Indeed, long-term hyperglycemia impairs vascular function in the diabetic retina and diminishes blood supply to the tissue.
 
Dr. Qian’s laboratory investigates the cellular and molecular mechanisms of visual signal processing in the vertebrate retina. The current focus of the laboratory is to investigate the molecular structure of a new type of GABA receptor (the GABAc receptor) that predominantly presents on retinal neurons, and to understand the physiological function of this receptor in normal and diseased conditions.

Since 1996, Dr. Qian has worked in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Department of Biological Sciences, and Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

His undergraduate degree is from Nanjing University in the People’s Republic of China, with his masters in neurobiology from the Shanghai Institute of Physiology. His Ph.D. in Anatomy and Cell Biology came from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Qian performed his post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.