Nimesh Patel
University of Houston, TX·Neuroscience
Glaucoma damages retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), the nerve cells that carry visual signals from the eye to the brain, and causes permanent vision loss. High pressure inside the eye is a major risk factor.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
glaucoma
optic neuropathy
retinal ganglion cells
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jul 2030
What they work on
- 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.
- Determine whether loss of retinal vascular volume comes before inner retinal thinning, and whether eyes whose blood flow changes more when eye pressure is raised lose structure and function faster.
- Compare post-mortem vessel anatomy, including pericyte coverage, endothelial cell density and capillary basement membrane integrity, between healthy and glaucomatous primate eyes and relate it to live OCTA measures.
- Test whether faster eye elongation from form-deprivation myopia causes tissue remodeling at the optic nerve head and raises the risk of retinal ganglion cell loss and more severe experimental glaucoma.
- Test whether, as retinal ganglion cells are lost, contrast sensitivity for fine spatial detail declines before standard perimetry thresholds, and whether fast-progressing eyes show more neural noise with the equivalent noise paradigm.
More about the research
Yet some people with high pressure never develop glaucoma, while others with normal pressure go blind. Today's clinical tests detect and track the disease well, but they cannot predict which eyes are most vulnerable. This research uses non-human primates, whose eyes resemble ours, to find measurable features of the eye's blood vessels, tissue and visual function that could predict who gets worse and how fast. The lab also oversees a shared imaging facility for vision research.
Why it matters
Glaucoma is a leading cause of irreversible blindness and is expected to affect at least 111 million people worldwide by 2040. Lowering eye pressure alone does not protect everyone. Non-invasive vessel scans, eye-length measures and sensitive vision tests that flag at-risk or fast-progressing eyes could help clinicians identify which patients need closer monitoring or earlier treatment.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Osamah Saeedi
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research
Confirm with transgenic mouse models that adaptive optics optical coherence tomography (AO-OCT) signals specifically report retinal ganglion cell bodies and vascular pericytes, validating the imaging against gold-standard histology.
Raghu Krishnamoorthy
University of North Texas Health Science Center, TX·Pharmacology
Determine whether endothelin-1 (ET-1), a blood-vessel-tightening protein, acts through its ETA and ETB receptors to reduce mitophagy, the removal of damaged mitochondria, in retinal ganglion cells.
Shuliang Jiao
Florida International University, FL·Biomedical Engineering
Build a VIS-OCT platform combining 480 nm visible-light OCT, 840 nm near-infrared OCT and an autofluorescence detector. Use an A2E-stained reference target to obtain absolute fundus autofluorescence values.
The school
University of Houston: 21 labs on PI Pages, $239M a year on research, 374 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.