Clinical Trials

When the donor cornea is removed from the person who died, it is prepared for transplantation by an eye bank. The donor cornea is placed into a liquid that helps preserve the cornea until it is transplanted. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved storage of the cornea in this liquid for up to 14 days before the transplant. The purpose of this study is to see if the length of time the donor cornea is kept in the preservation liquid before the transplant affects the likelihood of the transplant being successful. We will follow participants for 3 years after transplant to see if there are any differences in transplant success or in the number of transplanted endothelial cells (the layer of cells that line the undersurface of the cornea) on the corneas that were preserved for 7 days or less compared to those preserved between 8 and 14 days. We have no reason to believe that there is any greater risk for transplant failure with either preservation time group.

Glaucoma is a major cause of blindness. The inability to predict a patient's IOP response to medications is a critical barrier for the clinician to consistently provide highly effective IOP-based treatments. Current trial-and error approaches to glaucoma management are inefficient and have not addressed this barrier as there are no predictive factors for drug response. Our long-term goal is to improve outcomes by identifying biomarkers and environmental factors that profile a patient at risk for glaucoma by age-of-onset, rate of disease progression, "poor response" to treatment, and large IOP fluctuation. Our purpose of this research project is to address this critical barrier by focusing on physiological factors that predict IOP response to drugs.