Osamah Saeedi
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research
Glaucoma slowly destroys retinal ganglion cells, the neurons that carry visual signals from the eye to the brain, and is a leading cause of irreversible blindness. By the time standard tests detect it, a lot of tissue and vision is already gone, and the one treatment available — lowering pressure inside the eye — fails for a substantial fraction of patients.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
- Topics
glaucoma
retinal ganglion cells
pericytes
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Mar 2030
What they work on
- 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.
- Track AO-OCT cellular changes longitudinally in two established mouse glaucoma models to determine when retinal ganglion cell and pericyte morphology first shifts during disease progression.
- Follow 50 people with mild glaucoma for two years, relating AO-OCT cell-level biomarkers to conventional clinical measures of progression and developing AI-based vessel segmentation to identify pericytes precisely.
- Compare the Brillouin corneal modulus, an optical, pressure-independent measure of corneal stiffness, between primary open angle glaucoma patients and age-matched controls to test whether glaucomatous corneas are less stiff.
- Test longitudinally whether short-term use of topical prostaglandin analog eye drops lowers the Brillouin corneal modulus in glaucoma patients and controls, with implications for intraocular pressure targets.
- Quantify impaired autoregulation of retinal blood flow in early glaucoma using erythrocyte mediated angiography flowmetry and multimodal adaptive optics, and test whether it predicts further glaucomatous damage.
- Determine the relationship between retinal capillary density and retinal ganglion cell density in glaucoma subjects and controls, testing whether local vascular changes precede structural deficits.
More about the research
These projects all pursue the same goal from three angles: find measurements that reveal glaucoma earlier and track its progression faster, so that candidate drugs protecting the nerve cells can actually be tested in reasonably sized trials. One project images individual cells in the living retina, one measures the mechanical stiffness of the cornea, and one measures blood flow in the eye's smallest vessels.
Why it matters
Glaucoma affects millions and current tests catch it only after substantial, permanent vision loss, which also makes trials of nerve-protecting drugs slow and expensive. Sensitive biomarkers from single-cell retinal imaging, optical measurement of corneal stiffness and direct capillary blood flow could identify at-risk eyes earlier, help clinicians judge whether pressure-lowering treatment is sufficient for a given patient, and shorten the trials needed to prove new neuroprotective therapies work.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Development, Refinement, and Validation of Sensitive and Robust AO-OCT Glaucoma Biomarkers
NIH · May 2026 – Mar 2030
Development of Robust Corneal Biomechanical Biomarkers for Glaucoma Using Brillouin Microscopy
NIH · Jul 2024 – Jun 2027
Direct Measures of Retinal Blood Flow and Autoregulation as Robust Biomarkers for Early Glaucoma
NIH · Sep 2021 – Jun 2027
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.
Donald Miller
Indiana University, IN·Biomedical Engineering
Measure the spectral sensitivity, or color response, of individual photoreceptors in the living human eye using adaptive-optics optical coherence tomography (AO-OCT) with phase-sensitive detection.
Ahmara Ross
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Determine how WDR36 WD40-domain variants affect retinal ganglion cell survival and shape, using a WDR36 mutant mouse and RGCs grown from human stem cells with patient mutations.
The school
University of Maryland, Baltimore: 23 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 79 research doctorates a year.
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