Matthew Van Hook, PhD, awarded glaucoma grant

Matthew Van Hook, PhD, assistant professor in the UNMC Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, has received a $150,000 grant from Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB), which will fund a two-year study on the breakdown between the eyes and the brain during glaucoma.

The grant, an RPB/The Glaucoma Foundation Career Advancement Award, will be used to explore the way connections from the eye to the brain break down during glaucoma – the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide, Dr. Van Hook said.

"Glaucoma is related to the degeneration of neurons within the eye, specifically retinal ganglion cells. They make connections from the eyes to the visual centers of the brain," Dr. Van Hook said. "During this disease, the function of those connections breaks down, and we think that contributes to the process of blindness – not just the degeneration of the neurons, but the loss of the connection and the disruption of visual information going from the retina to parts of the brain."

The grant, one of only five that were granted this year, will help Dr. Van Hook build on his first National Institutes of Health R01 grant, which looked at the time course and mechanism of that degeneration process.

"This study is trying to explore the mechanisms of that."

Specifically, Dr. Van Hook’s lab will try to determine whether a population of cells called microglia, which are immune cells within the brain, play a role in disrupting those connections.

"Microglia cells respond to injury and disease, and they monitor the environment within the brain," he said. "They also play an important role during brain development; they can actually refine the synaptic connections of those information transfer points. They can engulf them and digest them, and that’s a natural process that the brain uses as it goes from immature to a mature state

"Our major hypothesis is that the microglia cells are reawakened in a pathological way, and they start to actually digest some of those connections in a non-helpful manner, and that contributes to blindness."

Dr. Van Hook said the award will allow his research to understand some of the players within the brain that could be contributing to the degeneration process.

"If you can understand the processes that are leading to that pathology – in this case, breaking down the connections from the retina to the brain – then perhaps you can find ways of interrupting or slowing it," he said.

Ronald Krueger, MD, director of the Truhlsen Eye Institute and chair of the ophthalmology and visual sciences department, congratulated Dr. Van Hook on the highly competitive award.

"Research to Prevent Blindness is one of the largest and most prestigious national funding organizations in the field of ophthalmology," Dr. Krueger said. "We are honored to receive this RPB/The Glaucoma Foundation Career Advancement Award in support of Dr. Van Hook's research at UNMC, and we are proud to have such a fine scientist on our UNMC faculty."