Feast for the eyes
Grasmere as autumn breaks in England’s Lake District. A place of boyhood vacations and some of my earliest visual memories. Used with permission of NorthNews, UK.
Remarkable as our visual system is, sometimes it needs a helping hand.
Vision – that most precious of senses – can be lost in blinding diseases such as glaucoma. In glaucoma the eye cells controlling eye pressure malfunction. Loss of eye pressure control causes accidental injury to retinal nerve cells that is the basis of glaucoma blindness. Why does it happen? Can the broken parts be fixed?
Current glaucoma treatments aim to reduce the damaging effect of uncontrolled eye pressure but cannot correct the underlying problem. This means glaucoma patients need lifelong treatment to protect from ongoing injury to vision.
My laboratory focuses on the root cause of glaucoma. We are are working to understand the fundamental problem underlying glaucoma to find new ways to treat it. We believe better solutions are at hand.
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For over ten years Dr. Tan directed National Institutes of Health-funded basic research programs at the Doheny Eye Institute, UCLA and University of Southern California. He currently oversees Sightgene, Inc., a research and innovation laboratory in Los Angeles. His research focuses on advanced cellular imaging of eye tissues, molecular causes of glaucoma, new drug discovery, and glaucoma surgical techniques and outcomes. He is an inventor on intellectual property for the diagnosis and treatment of glaucoma.
He completed his Doctoral scientific studies at Moorfields Eye Hospital and the Institute of Ophthalmology in London, gaining a PhD at University College London, UK. Here he developed automated technology to identify progressive optic nerve damage in glaucoma. He conducted postdoctoral research in glaucoma cell biology and physiology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and University of Wisconsin.
The publication tab provides a fuller synopsis of Dr. Tan’s research.