Glaucoma Treatment Research at Missouri S&T Receives NIH Funding

The Missouri University of Science and Technology (S&T) announced that the National Institutes for Health (NIH) has awarded an R01 grant to Professor Hu Yang, PhD, who is S&T’s Doshi Endowed Department Chair of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering.

The grant will provide Dr. Yang’s research team with $2.5 million in funding over the next 5 years. Other researchers for the project include retina cell biologist Xiaorong Liu, PhD, and her team from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as Christopher Leffler, MD, an ophthalmologist from Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia.

According to S&T, Dr. Yang is pioneering new glaucoma treatments. He has studied glaucoma treatments for more than 14 years and has developed and improved multiple versions of glaucoma medications in the form of eye drops.

“There is no cure so far for the disease, but the research we are conducting should make a significant difference for patients,” stated Dr. Yang in the S&T press release.

Dr. Yang and his fellow researchers have developed a treatment that could eventually allow patients to only use eye drops once per week instead of daily that should also be more effective than current regimens to reduce the pressure in the eye and lessen the impact and symptoms of the disease.

As explained in the S&T press release, the treatment involves a nanoparticle delivery system that delivers more ophthalmic medications into the eye. With current eye drops, only approximately 2% of the treatment reaches its targeted location. The new formulation, which will deliver more than one type of medication, will work to drain blockages in the eyes, while reducing the production of aqueous humor, noted Dr. Yang.

Although the current NIH grant project is for 5 years, Dr. Yang has developed multiple iterations of the treatment over the past several years and he said it would still be possible to begin clinical trials before the current project is completed.

“This treatment should make a significant difference for patients with glaucoma, so we obviously would like to see them benefit from it as soon as possible,” commented Dr. Yang in the S&T press release. “We have worked on this for several years and are highly optimistic about its potential efficacy.”