All May See Foundation is pleased to announce new faculty research awards totaling $250,000, approved at its April 2025 Board meeting. These awards support innovative projects at the UCSF Department of Ophthalmology and the Francis I. Proctor Foundation.
Project: Designing Mechanism-Based Therapeutics for Dry AMD
- Principal Investigator: Aparna Lakkaraju, PhD
- Summary: Dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) causes progressive central vision loss and lacks effective treatment. This project explores a newly identified interaction between complement protein C3 and serine protease HTRA1, which appears to regulate the health of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). Disruption of this balance leads to RPE degeneration and vision loss. The research aims to uncover how this interaction drives disease and to identify new therapeutic targets to preserve vision.
Project: A Novel Platform for High-Throughput Autoantibody Analysis in Eye Disease
- Principal Investigator: Matilda Chan, MD, PhD
- Summary: Autoantibodies contribute to diseases such as thyroid eye disease, uveitis, and corneal graft rejection. Current methods to study these antibodies are limited in scale and don’t allow for reuse. This project proposes a new high-throughput system to recover and repeatedly analyze autoantibodies from patients, improving our understanding of their role in eye disease and informing new treatments.
Project: Developing CRISPR Therapies for Dominant Retinitis Pigmentosa
- Principal Investigator: Bruce Conklin, MD
- Summary: Many retinal diseases are caused by dominant mutations in a single gene copy. This project tests CRISPR technology to selectively disable the mutant gene while preserving the normal one. The initial focus is on PRPF8, with the goal of creating a broadly applicable approach for multiple retinal diseases that are “dominant and deleteable.”
Project: Understanding Retinal Degeneration in Bardet-Biedl Syndrome (BBS)
- Principal Investigator: Maxence Nachury, PhD
- Summary: Bardet-Biedl Syndrome (BBS) is a genetic condition that causes retinal degeneration. This project focuses on how defects in the interphotoreceptor matrix, particularly the mis-trafficking of IMPG2 protein, lead to photoreceptor death. Using animal models, the study will examine how reducing damaging chemicals and inflammation in the retina may slow disease progression.
Project: Equipment Replacement for Ocular Development Studies
- Principal Investigator: Douglas Gould, PhD
- Summary: The Gould lab studies eye development and glaucoma risk using mouse models and focuses on how extracellular matrix proteins like collagen IV alpha 1 (COL4A1) contribute to disease. The grant supports the replacement of essential molecular imaging equipment (a ChemiDoc system) required for protein and nucleic acid analysis.
Projects were selected through a competitive peer-review process where faculty and postdoctoral fellows propose new research, and the top-rated proposals are awarded “kick-starter” funding to get their projects up and running.
The Foundation’s goal is that these awards will enable recipients to generate data that will support larger scale proposals, leveraging the funds to generate additional external federal and private support. Our objective is to hasten scientific breakthroughs in diseases of the eye – here and around the world. All May See Foundation is committed to saving and restoring sight and inspiring hope that, one day, all may see