Grant: Project Grant

Anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (AION) is a stroke of the nerve fibers that connect the eye to the brain. In middle-aged and older people, AION is the most common cause of sudden blindness caused by injury to those fibers. There is no proven treatment for AION, and patients rarely recover all of their vision because the fibers eventually die. We recently discovered that injury to the nerve fibers causes a specific molecule to move from inside the fiber to outside the fiber, and this movement propagates down the fiber like a series of dominoes. We now want to understand how the molecule signals the fiber to die, and how its movement can be blocked, e.g. with specific drugs. The goal is to use this knowledge to better understand AION, and hopefully find ways to treat it.