By entering our raffle today, not only are you in with a chance of winning amazing cash prizes, you will also be supporting world-leading research taking place at Moorfields and the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology. Below is just one example of the groundbreaking research that is taking place right now thanks to supporters like you.
Killifish: a faster way to study retinal ageing
Ageing is the most important risk factor for a number of eye conditions, including age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma. We are supporting a PhD student in Dr Ryan MacDonald’s lab to study killifish as a new model to understand the ageing eye.
Studies on the ageing eye, including genetic studies, are challenging due to the limited experimental models available to researchers. This ultimately slows down research into why we lose sight as we age and impacts the development of new therapies to combat age-related vision decline and disease.
The African turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri) is a freshwater fish that lives 4 to 6 months, which is the shortest known lifespan of any animal with a backbone. The killifish also has an eye structure similar to human eye and shows common signs of ageing including vision loss and neurodegeneration.
The potential to study the rapidly ageing killifish could significantly advance discoveries and our understanding of why we age and how we can slow or reverse damage in the ageing eye.
Dr MacDonald and team have expertise in developing, imaging and studying fish models of human neurodegenerative disease. The aims of this project are to investigate whether the aged killifish retina shows similar signs of retinal degeneration as are found in aged human retina; and whether the molecular processes driving neurodegeneration are the same for humans and fish.