Eleonora (Nora) Lad, MD, PhD received the Research to Prevent Blindness Ernest & Elizabeth Althouse Special Scholar Award. This is a two year award to support currently unfunded research. Lad received the award based on her grant submission, "Monocytes in Dry AMD: Histopathology and Functional Biomarkers."
The goal of this work is to understand the causes of visual function impairment in AMD patients with high-risk intermediate dry AMD, the mechanism for progression to late stage AMD and to develop biomarkers to predict these changes. Lad and her reserach team will use a combination of blood samples from patients with intermediate AMD and normal patients, and postmortem eyes with from a large collection of autopsy eyes at Duke.
The award will cover flow cytometry work performed on the human blood samples, analysis of imaging biomarkers in clinical AMD patients and histopathology experiments in human postmortem eyes. This research is significant because it will generate important new knowledge about the role of specific inflammatory cells (monocytes and macrophages) in AMD progression.
The data will support the concept that specific populations of these immune cells should be investigated as therapeutic targets for treatment of dry AMD and justify studies to understand their function in this debilitating disease.