A multi-institutional team of researchers, including two Northwestern University engineers, has received up to $56 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to help make vision-restoring, whole-eye transplants a reality, the agency announced today.
The funding will support a six-year effort to develop and test Viability, Imaging, Surgical, Immunomodulation, Ocular preservation and Neuroregeneration (VISION) strategies for whole-eye transplant.
Northwestern's Hao F. Zhang and Cheng Sun will help design, develop and test a new generation of visible-light optical coherence tomography (vis-OCT), a functional imaging technology conceived at Northwestern that provides new capabilities for anatomical and functional imaging of the eye. With vis-OCT, researchers will analyze eyeballs from potential organ donors to determine whether they are suitable for harvesting. The Northwestern team also will support imaging needs to evaluate eyeballs before transplant surgery and in fundamental investigations in animal models.
"Supporting ARPA-H's ambitious goal with our unique retinal imaging technology brings a unique benefit to Northwestern investigators to translate advanced imaging technologies developed at Northwestern labs to potentially improve patients' lives," Zhang said. "Close collaboration with team members across the nation will also lead to new and exciting technical innovations."
An expert in optical coherence imaging, Zhang is a professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering, where he leads the Functional Optical Imaging Laboratory and founded the Center of Engineering for Vision and Ophthalmology. Sun is a professor of mechanical engineering at McCormick, where he develops innovative 3D-printing techniques focused on biomedical applications.
VISION is part of ARPA-H's Transplantation of Human Eye Allografts (THEA), a program that seeks to revolutionize the reconnection of nerves to the brain and develop breakthroughs not yet accomplished in transplantation, preservation and neuroscience to restore sight to people who are blind.
The VISION team includes 40 scientists, medical doctors and industry experts from across the United States. With a mix of skill and expertise, team members will simultaneously advance and create cutting-edge medical devices, artificial intelligence integrations, new surgical techniques, generative medicine breakthroughs and transplant rejection mitigations.
Transplants aren't new in ophthalmology. Annually, more than 70,000 people in the United States donate their eyes after they die, allowing for life-improving and vision-saving transplants of the cornea, the clear, outermost layer of the eye. But those transplants don't address the most common causes of irreversible vision loss in the world - retinal neurodegeneration caused by diseases such as glaucoma, macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy.
That's where ophthalmologists and vision scientists hope that THEA will fill in the gaps. To do so, researchers will face the enormous challenge of determining how to regenerate a functional optic nerve, which connects the eye to the brain.
"This group of people has been working for decades now on figuring out how to promote optic nerve regeneration and retinal neuron survival in glaucoma and other blinding diseases," said Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg, chair of ophthalmology and director of the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University and principal investigator of the grant. "That positions this group of collaborators to be the best situated to take on optic nerve regeneration and neuronal cell survival in the context of eye transplant."
Although the project's ultimate goal is to realize whole eye transplants, the effort will undoubtedly bring more breakthroughs along the way.
"As we develop a series of new technologies that could be vision restorative in THEA and also in the many patients with glaucoma and other eye diseases, we'll leverage all the proper channels to ensure new drugs, gene therapies and devices can be accessible to all," Goldberg said.
