A team of Creighton University researchers in Omaha has received a $2.9 million federal grant for a glaucoma research project.
A Grant Years in the Making
The $2.9 million award comes from the National Institutes of Health, according to Kearney Hub. The funding supports Creighton researchers Gopal Jadhav, Catherine Opere and Somnath Singh in their glaucoma research, the paper reports. Creighton’s announcement also describes the project as glaucoma treatment research.
Jadhav specializes in medicinal chemistry, Opere in ocular pharmacology and glaucoma research, and Singh in drug delivery and sustained-release methods, per the Kearney Hub report.
Why Pressure Control Isn't Enough
Glaucoma damages the optic nerve and remains a leading cause of blindness worldwide, the Kearney Hub reports. Existing treatments focus almost entirely on lowering pressure inside the eye, but that approach has a well-documented limitation: some patients keep losing vision even after their eye pressure is brought under control, according to the paper. That's because elevated pressure damages neurons at the back of the eye, and once those neurons are gone, the resulting blindness is irreversible, the Kearney Hub notes.
Latanoprost is used in glaucoma treatment. The Creighton team's answer was to combine three independent compounds into one molecule — adding nitric oxide and hydrogen sulfide to latanoprost itself, creating what the researchers describe as a multifunctional version that is a first in the field, according to the Kearney Hub's reporting.
Gasotransmitters in Glaucoma Research
The idea of pairing gasotransmitters with pressure-lowering drugs isn't unique to Omaha. A separate review of the field found that nitric oxide and hydrogen sulfide could both reduce intraocular pressure and mitigate neurodegeneration, describing gasotransmitters as part of a broader shift from pressure-only treatment toward therapies that target multiple problems at once, according to a study published via doi.org. That same review was co-authored by Creighton's Somnath Singh and Catherine Opere.
Separately, nitric oxide has been studied in relation to aqueous humor outflow, and nitric oxide-donating drugs on the market include latanoprostene bunod, according to a study published in ScienceDirect. Research involving Creighton’s Opere has also tested hydrogen sulfide donors directly: a study using the compound GYY 4137 in normotensive rabbits found it produced a dose-dependent drop in eye pressure, reaching a maximum decrease of 27.8% after six hours, according to a report published by Texas Southern University’s digital scholarship archive. A related formulation of that compound has also been studied for sustained hydrogen sulfide release, per a study in Springer’s AAPS PharmSciTech.
Next Steps
The researchers hope to advance the work toward the clinical stage, according to the Kearney Hub.
A Growing Global Health Burden
The stakes behind the research are considerable.
Separate projections cited in a study published by BMJ Open estimate that global glaucoma cases climbed from about 4.07 million in 1990 to 7.59 million in 2021, with disability-adjusted life years from the disease rising from roughly 467,600 to 759,900 over the same period. The same research projects the number of people affected worldwide could grow from about 95 million to 111.8 million by 2040.
The project is part of Creighton’s glaucoma research.
