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Center News and Events
Sign up or donate to Cycle for Sight 2025!
Cycle for Sight 2025 kicked off at the Princeton Club West on Saturday, March 15th; teams will continue to exercise in the community through April. You can register or donate to Cycle for Sight 2025 now! The McPherson Eye Research Institute’s annual fundraising event supports a range of grants for research on blinding diseases taking place at UW-Madison and collaborating institutions. Teams and individual participants are both welcome!
Now on display in the Mandelbaum & Albert Family Vision Gallery: Constructs of Color Hard and Soft
As a fundamental aspect of human experience, color influences our perceptions, emotions, and interactions with the world around us. This exhibition – comprised of stained glass works by Randy Glysch and of fiber, needlework, and mixed media stitchworks by twenty-two Memory Cloth Circle artists – will explore the multifaceted impacts of color. The exhibition runs until May 30th, 2025.
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Research News
Researchers ‘seq’ and find a way to make pig retinal cells to advance eye treatments
In a new study published in Stem Cell Reports, the Gamm Lab partnered with researchers at the Morgridge Institute for Research to develop lab-grown pig retinal organoids. They found that pig-derived photoreceptors shared many similarities with those made from human retinal organoids. The researchers have now begun to do transplants in pigs using photoreceptors from the pig organoids to determine whether they establish connections and make synapses with downstream neurons. You can find the published paper here, and an article on the research by the Morgridge Institute here.
New research in Nature Communications from the lab of MERI PI Raunak Sinha!
Congratulations to Raunak Sinha, the McPherson ERI’s David and Nancy Walsh Family Professor, for his group’s latest publication in Nature Communications! In their article, Saha et al. show that light adaptation, our visual system’s ability to adjust its photoreceptors’ light sensitivity so that we can see over a range of light levels, varies across regions of the primate retina. You can read the full article here.
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Member News
Congratulations to the winners of our inaugural Grant Accelerator Program Competition!
The McPherson Eye Research Institute is pleased to announce the winners of our inaugural Grant Accelerator Program (GAP) award competition! Supported by the Alice McPherson Endowment Fund for the Visual Sciences, the Van Vreede McPherson ERI Greatest Needs Fund, the Robert A. Brandt Macular Degeneration Fund, and additional donors to the McPherson ERI, the Grant Accelerator Program provides seed funding for innovative research that advances knowledge of the visual system in health or disease, and/or applies such knowledge to augment, protect, or restore vision or the visual experience. All GAP awards are intended to promote exploration of new ideas and generation of critical data to accelerate and strengthen subsequent grant applications to external funding organizations.
Congratulations to Prof. Krishanu Saha!
Congratulations to MERI PI and Retina Research Foundation Murphy Chair Prof. Krishanu Saha (WID, CoE, SMPH), who was recently named by STAT News as one of the 10 scientists who are moving CRISPR gene editing forward! Among other things, Saha’s current research is leveraging the power of CRISPR to develop new therapies for previously untreatable eye diseases. Read more (story is behind a paywall) here.
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Center News and Events
Vision Research Update 2025
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the 2025 Vision Research Update! The talk, which was given by Dr. David Gamm, covered the Institute’s recent work on inherited retinal disease and age-related macular degeneration and included a Q&A session where members of the public could ask any questions they had on vision research and current treatments.
To watch the recording or download a transcript of the event, please contact Michael Chaim at chaim@wisc.edu.
Visions of Science: Art from Eye Research
In this 20th anniversary year of the McPherson Eye Research Institute, the vision gallery features a retrospective of research-inspired images from our fifteen years of Eye Research Institute calendars – exhibiting 45 amazingly engaging images from Institute members’ research, selected from among the ~180 featured in annual calendars.
This exhibit also showcases cover designs by Swedish artist/designer/illustrator Malin Nordlund, whose eye-catching and creative works have graced the McPherson ERI’s calendars from 2013 to the present.
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Research News
Groundbreaking Stem Cell Clinical Trial for Retinal Disease Treats Its First Patient
Using a stem cell-derived therapeutic developed over more than a decade in Dr. David Gamm’s lab at UW-Madison, BlueRock Therapeutics has treated the first patient in a new Phase 1/2a clinical trial aimed at a group of inherited retinal disorders (including RP and cone-rod dystrophy). The initiative is the result of a strategic research alliance formed in 2021 between the Gamm laboratory, Opsis Therapeutics, Fujifilm Cellular Dynamics Inc., BlueRock Therapeutics, and Bayer to bring these therapies to patients. The induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived photoreceptor cell product OpCT-001 is designed to restore functional photoreceptors to patients with RP and other retinal diseases leading to primary photoreceptor loss. In response to news of this first treatment, Dr. Gamm noted that “…this is an important and necessary first step in testing this first-of-its-kind therapy, and we are grateful to all of the people participating and monitoring the trial. I am particularly pleased that this strategy and human iPS cell technology in general was born, developed, and refined here at UW-Madison.”
Researchers find the tipping point at which compensatory measures in a diseased retinal circuit shift from beneficial to detrimental
A recent study by the Hoon lab published in Current Biology has uncovered new modes of retinal circuit compensation and adaptation in response to impairments seen in congenital stationary night blindness (CSNB). CSNB is a retinal disease where input to a primary retinal pathway is suppressed. Using mouse models that mimic different stages of disease severity, partial vs complete suppression, Khoussine et al., uncovered that the degree of suppression determined the nature of the compensatory measures recruited by the downstream retinal circuit. Partial suppression engaged compensatory measures that preserved normal retinal function whereas complete suppression induced deleterious alterations that eroded retinal visual processing. These findings also reveal substrates in the retinal circuitry that can be targeted for potential therapeutic interventions aimed at restoring visual function. Read the full article here.
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Member News
Congratulations to Grant Summit Program (GSP) Award Winner Donna Neumann!
Congratulations to Associate Professor Donna Neumann, one of our latest recipients of the MERI Grant Summit Program (GSP) Award!
Prof. Neumann’s winning research proposal was entitled ‘Inhibiting repair of the Herpes Simplex Virus genome for therapeutic effect.’ This project investigates the role of cellular single-strand DNA damage repair in the repair of nicks and gaps in HSV-1 genomes during infection. Her award will be used to generate further preliminary data in preparation for her upcoming grant resubmission.
Congratulations to Grant Summit Program (GSP) Award Winner Xin Huang!
Congratulations to Associate Professor Xin Huang, one of our latest recipients of the MERI Grant Summit Program (GSP) Award!
Prof. Huang’s winning research proposal was entitled ‘Neural Mechanisms Underlying Perceptual Organization.’ This project investigates how the visual system selectively integrates local visual elements into a coherent object while segregating different objects from one another based on visual motion cues. His award will be used to generate further preliminary data in preparation for his upcoming grant resubmission to the NIH/NEI Neuroscience of Basic Visual Processes Study Section.
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Center News and Events
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Center News and Events
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Research News
Researchers ‘seq’ and find a way to make pig retinal cells to advance eye treatmentsIn a new study published in Stem Cell Reports, the Gamm Lab partnered with researchers at the Morgridge Institute for Research to develop lab-grown pig retinal organoids. They found that pig-derived photoreceptors shared many similarities with those made from human retinal organoids. The researchers have now begun to do transplants in pigs using photoreceptors from the pig organoids to determine whether they establish connections and make synapses with downstream neurons. You can find the published paper here, and an article on the research by the Morgridge Institute here. |
Research News
Researchers ‘seq’ and find a way to make pig retinal cells to advance eye treatmentsIn a new study published in Stem Cell Reports, the Gamm Lab partnered with researchers at the Morgridge Institute for Research to develop lab-grown pig retinal organoids. They found that pig-derived photoreceptors shared many similarities with those made from human retinal organoids. The researchers have now begun to do transplants in pigs using photoreceptors from the pig organoids to determine whether they establish connections and make synapses with downstream neurons. You can find the published paper here, and an article on the research by the Morgridge Institute here. |
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Member News
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Upcoming Events
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Apr08
High School Outreach Visit - LaFollette LaFollette High School
Classroom of Madisyn Estkowski Sign Up -
Apr10
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Apr14
MERI Monthly Seminar Series - April @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm 1360 Biotech
Directions https://vision.wisc.edu/current-seminar-series/ -
Apr15
Middle School Outreach Visit - Spring Harbor Spring Harbor Middle School
Tally Kruger's Classroom Sign Up
Award Opportunities
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Apr06
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Jun19
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Aug28
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Sep02
Dr. Monroe Trout
Dr. Monroe Eugene Trout, Sr. (1931-2024)
The McPherson ERI notes with sorrow the passing of Dr. Monroe Trout, an Honorary Advisory Board member, supporter, and friend of the Institute since 2013. Alongside his wife Sandra, Dr. Trout has been instrumental in helping the McPherson ERI grow over the past decade, and in giving an outstanding impetus to macular degeneration research at the Institute.
Apart from their steadfast support of vision science and commitment to curing blinding diseases, the philanthropic efforts of Dr. Trout and his wife have had an incalculable impact on people and institutions both within and outside the state of Wisconsin. Their rich legacy of aiding those in need will continue to extend far into the future.
Dr. Trout lived a full, generous, and meaningful life, and will be missed by his McPherson ERI friends and by many others.
Remembering Dr. Alice McPherson
With great sadness, the McPherson ERI notes the passing on January 16th, 2023, of our namesake and co-founder, Dr. Alice R. McPherson. Dr. McPherson’s many remarkable achievements are profiled on our website and are honored in the Spring 2023 issue of our InSights newsletter. Her effects on the McPherson Eye Research Institute and UW-Madison, on many other institutions, and on so many patients and researchers around the world, are incalculable.