When Margaret DeAngelis was a little girl in Connecticut, a blind man visited her elementary school to talk about the challenges of living without sight.
“It had a profound effect on me,” she said. She recalls thinking, “When I grow up, I want to cure blindness.”
Now a leading researcher on diseases that impair vision, DeAngelis runs a lab at the University at Buffalo that’s home to a reputable eye bank that holds promising keys to preventing and treating conditions that rob human eyesight.
DeAngelis recently gained widespread recognition for UB by leading a collaborative study that revealed new information on the genetic pathways and mechanisms involved in age-related macular degeneration, a top cause of blindness in older adults.
The research, published in the journal Cell Genomics, involved scientists from UB and UBMD Ophthalmology at the Ross Eye Institute, the University of Utah, Harvard University and biotech giant Genentech. The collaboration used new technologies to analyze eye tissue from the bank DeAngelis spent 10 years building.
The research focused on the area of the eye damaged by macular degeneration – the macula, part of the retina at the back of the eye that processes central vision. The disease leaves patients with only peripheral vision and blurs the straight-ahead sight needed to read, drive and recognize faces.
Age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, affects 200 million adults globally, and scientists don’t know what causes it – yet.
DeAngelis and her team used a variety of state-of-the-art and emerging techniques to compare the genetic makeup of macular tissue from 82 donors who had age-related macular degeneration and 85 who had “normal” vision. Among many promising discoveries, they identified two novel genes likely involved in causing AMD as well as potential drug targets, or molecules in the body that might be tapped to help treat the disease.
What makes DeAngelis’ eye bank so…
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