New grant supports cornea research
The human body is an engineering marvel with complex systems and functions similar to machines. The eye is considered the second most complex organ after the brain, with more than two million working parts.
Like any mechanism, things can go wrong. In the eyes, a disease called keratoconus is a progressive disorder characterized by the thinning and bulging of the cornea – the clear front window of the eye – and creates an abnormal curvature resulting in blurred and distorted vision.
In an effort to help people suffering from keratoconus, UIC’s Hamed Hatami-Marbini, associate professor and director of graduate studies in mechanical and industrial engineering, has partnered with Eversight Center for Vision and Eye Banking Research to advance promising eye and vision research.
Eversight recently awarded Hatami-Marbini with a grant that engages in meaningful scientific research and aligns with Eversight’s mission to restore sight and prevent blindness through the healing power of donation, transplantation, and research.
“This research helps Eversight to enact our vision to restore sight and prevent blindness throughout the world,” said Sara McKoy, partner relations director at Eversight. “We need these critical research efforts to foster innovation, which is the stronghold that will move us and our partners in our vision forward.”
For this investigation Hatami-Marbini, director of the Computational Biomechanics Research Laboratory at UIC, is focusing on understanding the transparent tissue of the cornea on the front of the eye. The cornea is the clear, dome-shaped outer layer of the eye that protects it and plays a crucial role in vision.
“It’s of interest to a lot of people to know why that tissue is transparent,” he said. “We look at it from a different perspective and are interested to see why the tissue has its strength, because there are diseases in which the tissue loses its stiffness or its mechanical strength. When you look at the tissues, like any other thing, it is composed of different ingredients, and the primary ingredient of this tissue is collagen.”
There are unique features that contribute to the cornea being transparent. One is the organizing of the collagens in a way that it doesn’t interfere with the light and allows the light to go through it. To keep this collagen at a certain distance or the same arrangement there is another tissue component at work called proteoglycans (PGs), which also contribute to tissue hydration and elasticity.
“One of the goals of this research is to learn about the role of those other components because everybody talks about the collagen and there is little talk about the PGs,” said Hatami-Marbini.
In addition to normal tissue, the partnership with Eversight has the potential to provide Hatami-Marbini with access to donated diseased tissue to research.
“The goal here is to compare the tissues of the normal tissue and the diseased tissue to see how the PGs vary from each other,” he said. “The long-term goal of this work is to alter the PG content in a controlled way so that the structural functions of PGs in microstructure and biomechanical properties are fully understood.”