Prize for glaucoma breakthrough

  • May 12, 2015
Prize for glaucoma breakthrough

Paper which marks a breakthrough in glaucoma research wins ophthalmology award.

The work helps not only to bring potential stem cell-based therapies for neurodegenerative disease closer to clinical translation, but also identifies new pathways that could be targeted by pharmaceutical approaches.

Thomas Johnson

A paper by a Gates Cambridge alumnus on a novel mechanism by which stem cell transplantation may help to prevent glaucoma has won top prize at a prestigious ophthalmology awards ceremony.

The research by Thomas V Johnson won first place at the Association for Research In Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO)/Merck Innovative Ophthalmology Research Awards. 

Published in the journal Brain, the paper is based on work Thomas did as a Gates Cambridge Scholar as well as subsequent research and is part of a collaboration between the University of Cambridge’s John van Geest Centre for Brain Repair and the National Institutes of Health’s National Eye Institute in the United States.

Dr Johnson’s research focuses on glaucoma, a neurodegenerative disease of the optic nerve, the “cable” which carries visual information from the retina in the eye to the brain.  Glaucoma causes the progressive loss of retinal ganglion cells, which make up the optic nerve, eventually leading to vision loss and potentially blindness.  Previous research by Dr Johnson showed that transplantation of stem cells from the bone marrow into the eye could protect the optic nerve in a rodent model of glaucoma, but the mechanism by which that protection occurs was unclear.

It demonstrates that bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells produce and secrete a large number of proteins that each individually help to protect retinal ganglion cells from stress and cell death.  Together, the additive effect of these proteins (the stem cell “secretome”) appears to confer potent neuroprotection.  Dr Johnson’s team identified one particularly strong neuroprotective factor, platelet-derived growth factor or PDGF, that, when injected into a glaucomatous eye on its own, protected almost 90% of the optic nerve fibres that otherwise would have degenerated.

Dr Johnson [2006], who did his PhD in Brain Repair, says: "The work helps not only to bring potential stem cell-based therapies for neurodegenerative disease closer to clinical translation, but also identifies new pathways that could be targeted by pharmaceutical approaches."

Dr Johnson is currently based at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Latest News

Research impact award for Gates Cambridge Scholar

A Gates Cambridge Scholar is one of two winners of the 2023 Sandra Dawson Research Impact Award for his work on the economics of climate change earlier this month. The annual award was established through a generous donation from Professor Dame Sandra Dawson, a former Director of Cambridge’s Judge Business School. Winners are chosen based […]

AI system self-organises to resemble brains of complex organisms

A team of Cambridge scientists, co-led by a Gates Cambridge Scholar, have shown that placing physical constraints on an artificially-intelligent system – in much the same way that the human brain has to develop and operate within physical and biological constraints – allows it to develop features of the brains of complex organisms in order […]

Scholar wins history of science & medicine essay prize

A Gates Cambridge Scholar has won a prestigious essay competition about the history of early science with a treatise on evidence of knowledge exchange between the Ming-Chinese and Iberian conventions in the 16th century. The essay competition was run by the Early Sciences Forum of the History of Science Society and the Early Science and Medicine journal […]

Addressing the complex roots of environmental crime

Simone Haysom [2009] says her MPhil at the University of Cambridge helped to change her life course. While she had been interested in climate change and human geography as an undergraduate, doing the MPhil in Environment, Society and Development at an international university as part of the Gates Cambridge cohort broadened her perspective and set […]