Fabrice Manns
University of Miami, FL·Biomedical Engineering
Myopia, or nearsightedness, usually begins in childhood. It happens when the eye's focus no longer lands on the retina, so distant objects look blurry.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physics
- Topics
myopia
nearsightedness
crystalline lens
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2030
What they work on
- Follow children before and during myopia onset to test whether remodeling of the crystalline lens is coupled to eye elongation to offset focusing error, and whether this differs in emmetropic, myopic and myopia-control groups.
- Develop a new instrument that measures three-dimensional lens shape, eye distances and peripheral defocus across many viewing angles and near-focus demands in children, and use it to track how the lens shapes peripheral blur during accommodation.
- Build a database of anatomically accurate computer models of individual children's eyes that reproduce eye growth, lens remodeling, accommodation and central and peripheral defocus, for simulating myopia-control optical designs.
More about the research
During the years when myopia develops, the eye's focusing power is set mainly by two changes. The eyeball grows longer, and the crystalline lens, the eye's internal focusing lens, changes shape and power ("remodeling"). How these two changes work together, and how they go wrong in myopia, is poorly understood. Filling this gap could guide better optical treatments to slow myopia in children.
Why it matters
Myopia in children is common, and treatments to slow it are designed with limited knowledge of how the growing eye focuses light. New instruments, measurements and models of the child's lens and eye could help guide better optical treatments for myopia. The planned database of computer replicas of real children's eyes would let designers of myopia-control lenses test their designs before trying them on patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nimesh Patel
University of Houston, TX·Neuroscience
Test whether baseline retinal vascular volume and blood-flow variability, measured with OCTA (a 3D blood-flow scan), predict the rate of disease progression in non-human primates with experimental glaucoma.
Xiaohua Gong
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Genetics
Determine how variants of three modifier genes, Prx (periaxin), Bfsp2 (the lens filament protein phakinin) and PKIG (a PKA inhibitor), change the severity of age-related nuclear cataracts in connexin 46 knockout mice of different strains.
Charles Yu
Stanford University, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Determine the weight limit at which an intraocular implant becomes unstable in the eye, by implanting 25 dummy lenticule implants of differing weights into rabbits and observing them for six months.
The school
University of Miami: 30 labs on PI Pages, $559M a year on research, 297 research doctorates a year.
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