Research News

Dr. Hiroshi Nakamura receives AHAF grant for research on glaucoma

The American Health Assistance Foundation (AHAF) has awarded a grant to Hiroshi Nakamura MD, PhD, a visiting assistant research professor in the Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences, to support a project that will help manage serious post-operative complications of glaucoma surgery.

The grant to Nakamura is from the National Glaucoma Research Program, established by AHAF in 1978 to fund and advance research on glaucoma. Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of blindness in USA.

Currently, one of the treatment options for glaucoma is surgery. A common post-operative complication of glaucoma surgery is “ocular fibrotic response.” Excessive post-operation scarring often leads to failure of the filtration surgery. While the use of antimetabolites as conjunctival anti-scarring treatments benefits a number of patients, they do so by causing widespread tissue damage and are associated with severe and potentially blinding complications, such as infection.

Nakamura’s research aims at treating post-operative ocular fibrotic response by using RNA interference (RNAi) technology, commonly referred to as gene silencing, a process through which the expression of a targeted gene is suppressed. The target for Nakamura’s research is connective tissue growth factor (CTGF ), which has been identified as the cause for fibrotic response in various tissues including the eye. Nakamura proposes to target the CTGF and downregulate it. This is expected to help suppress fibrotic response or scarring.

Nakamura’s findings will be useful to clinical practice, as the results could promote new post-surgery care practices in glaucoma treatment.

Nakamura received his MD in 1991 from Shinshu University School of Medi cine in Nagano, Japan. He completed his PhD in 1999 at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo. He has been involved in glaucoma related research for over a decade.

AHAF has awarded Nakamura $90,000 over a period of two years to fund the CTGF silencing project.

by Poornima Krishnan