Joseph Fogerty, Ph.D., Receives $65,000 Knights Templar Eye Foundation Grant to Study Common Blinding Disorder in Children

Many current and past grand officers of the Grand Commandery of Ohio along with many Constituent officers traveled to the Cole Eye Institute at the Cleveland Clinic to present a $65,000 research grant check to Joseph Fogerty, Ph.D., to study a common blinding disorder in children known as Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis (LCA)

Many children with LCA have limited vision at birth, and most are severely impaired by their first birthday. The retina covers the back of the eye and converts the light entering the eye into a nerve signal that goes to the brain.

There are many different causes of LCA, but in most cases, the rod and cone cells in the retina die. Unfortunately, the body has no way to replace those cells once they are gone. They will be studying zebrafish, small freshwater fish that you can find in a pet shop, because unlike humans, these fish can regenerate neurons and replace the dead rods and cones. Their goal is to understand how the fish regenerates their retinas so that they can perhaps one day mimic the same process in LCA patients in order to restore vision.

The specific type of zebrafish they will be studying, however, do not replace all of their dying retina cells, and this makes them a particularly helpful animal model for LCA. By comparing regeneration-deficient zebrafish to healthy zebrafish, they can identify the molecular signals they lack that are essential for complete regeneration. By determining what signals are required to trigger regeneration of the rods and cones in zebrafish, it may be possible to translate this information to humans