Event

Please join us on Monday, March 28th for a GEM Work-in-Progress talk presented by Margaret DeAngelis, PhD, Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and Ira G. Ross and Elizabeth Olmsted Ross Endowed Chair with the Ira G. Ross Eye Institute.

Title: "Leveraging a donor eye repository to elucidate the molecular mechanisms underlying age-related macular degeneration"

Summary:
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that is the world’s leading cause of blindness in the aging population. There are no cures for this debilitating condition, which impairs and individuals' ability to drive, read and recognize faces. Although the clinical stages and forms of AMD have been elucidated, more specific prognostic tools are required to determine when patients with early and intermediate AMD will progress into the advanced stages of AMD. Given that it is still unknown if pathogenic changes in AMD are localized to specific ocular tissues or systemic, one must take into consideration that potential biomarkers identified in the peripheral blood and/or other non-ophthalmic human tissues as “disease associated” may not reflect the disease mechanism occurring in the neural retina and/or retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). Therefore, a first step in uncovering disease mechanism in AMD, may be to directly study the human tissue the disease affects, while complementing this with other systems biological approaches to develop appropriate preventive and therapeutic strategies.

These informal talks are part of the GEM Work-in-Progress series held at 4:00 p.m. on the 4th Monday of each month. Talks will take place remotely via Zoom. The speaker schedule is available on the GEM website: www.buffalo.edu/gem.

GEM is currently seeking faculty, post-doc and student speakers for our 2022 WIP series! If you would like to present at a GEM Work-in-Progress session, please let us know (coe-gem@buffalo.edu) and we will get you onto the schedule.

Sara Thomas
Email: msthomas@buffalo.edu