The Vision Research Consortium has significant strength in the areas of Visual Neuroscience, Molecular Genetics, Visual System Development, Multi-Center Clinical Trials and Clinical Research. These will provide research opportunities not available to individual faculty members. Core support will encourage inter-departmental collaboration, especially between basic and clinical scientists, and support pilot projects leading to new research programs. With the continued support of the Vision Core Grant, a further period of growth and innovative research is expected for the Vision Research Consortium. Despite these advances, ROP remains a leading cause of blindness in children.
More effective treatment is required in order to further reduce the rate of blindness.
The RM-ROP2 utilizes a number of risk factors to calculate the probability of an eye having an unfavorable structural outcome. Prethreshold infants with a 15 percent or higher risk of an unfavorable outcome will be randomized. Calcium-regulated release of neurotransmitter is a fundamentally important process throughout the central nervous system. How this process is regulated presynaptically is not yet fully understood, but recent advances in the detection of synaptic vesicle fusion and neurotransmitter release, combined with the identification of putative proteins that either comprise or interact with the secretion machinery have now made such mechanistic investigations feasible. The long-range goal of this research project is to understand how the transfer of visual information between the outer and inner retina is regulated at the presynaptic level in retinal bipolar cells.