IU researcher awarded $2.6 million to study causes of blindness
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An associate professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine has received a four-year, $2.1 million grant from the National Eye Institute and a three-year, $500,000 grant from the Foundation Fighting Blindness to study genetic causes of blindness.
Yoshikazu Imanishi, director of ocular neurobiology at the school’s Stark Neurosciences Research Institute, will conduct research related to retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that occurs in people who inherit mutated genes from their parents and later lose their vision, according to the university.
The condition affects 1 in 4,000 people in the United States. Symptoms usually start in childhood, and most people eventually lose most of their sight, the National Eye Institute says.
The grant from the National Eye Institute, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, will fund research into why proteins in specialized cells in the retina get misplaced and cause blindness.
“My goal is to better understand what causes blindness,” Imanishi said in a news release. “This grant aims to help us develop treatments and possibly find a cure for people who have retinitis pigmentosa, a condition caused by specific genetic mutations.”
The grant from the Baltimore-based nonprofit Foundation Fighting Blindness will fund Imanishi’s effort to discover small molecules that mitigate vision loss associated with certain gene mutations. The research will use an innovative method that allows scientists to quickly test thousands of potential drugs to find effective treatments, IU said.