An Overview of Glaucoma: Bidirectional Translation between Humans and Pre-Clinical Animal Models

Abstract

Glaucoma is a multifactorial, polygenetic disease with a shared outcome of loss of retinal ganglion cells and their axons, which ultimately results in blindness. The most common risk factor of this disease is elevated intraocular pressure (IOP), although many glaucoma patients have IOPs within the normal physiological range. Throughout disease progression, glial cells in the optic nerve head respond to glaucomatous changes, resulting in glial scar formation as a reaction to injury. This chapter overviews glaucoma as it affects humans and the quest to generate animal models of glaucoma so that we can better understand the pathophysiology of this disease and develop targeted therapies to slow or reverse glaucomatous damage. This chapter then reviews treatment modalities of glaucoma. Revealed herein is the lack of non-IOP-related modalities in the treatment of glaucoma. This finding supports the use of animal models in understanding the development of glaucoma pathophysiology and treatments.

Reverse translation of artificial intelligence in glaucoma: Connecting basic science with clinical applications

“…In another example, inspired by the relationship between aging and glaucoma in clinical settings, Lu et al designed retinal tissue reprogramming through the induction of ectopic expression of the four Yamanaka transcription factors and showed reverse age-related vision loss and eye damage in an aging mouse model with glaucoma (6). These and other related studies demonstrated the successful implication of reverse translation in glaucoma research (7)(8)(9).…”