Glaucoma is a progressive, irreversible optic neuropathy with variable presentation and clinical course and there is currently no way to pre-symptomatically distinguish patients at risk of severe and progressive disease from those individuals unlikely to develop glaucoma-related vision loss.
Nazlee Zebardast, MD, MSc, Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medicial School and Director of Glaucoma Imaging at Mass Eye and Ear, has been awarded a five-year $1,339,246.00 K23 grant from the National Eye Institute to use cutting edge machine learning integration of image-based phenotypes and genetic associations to discover novel disease related genetic associations, and test their utility for identifying glaucoma cases in independent cohorts. Dr. Zebardast ultimately hopes to develop a precision medicine approach using imaging and genetic features to improve our assessment of disease risk for any individual.