Dr. Gregory S. Hageman Awarded Prestigious Pisart Vision Award by Lighthouse International

NEW YORK, Jan. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Gregory S. Hageman, one of the world's most accomplished researchers in the field of Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) will share his discoveries exploring the concept that AMD is not a single, complex and progressive disease, but rather at least two diseases manifest by distinctly different biological pathways.  He will present his research and receive Lighthouse International's Pisart Vision Award on Thursday, January 19 at 4 p.m., at Lighthouse.

The prestigious Pisart Vision Award is given annually by Lighthouse International to an individual who has made a noteworthy contribution to preventing and treating vision impairment.  Lighthouse International is a leading nonprofit organization fighting vision loss through prevention, treatment and empowerment.   

Gregory Hageman, Ph.D., professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Utah and director of the Center for Translational Medicine at the John A. Moran Eye Center has spent the past two decades focusing his research on AMD.  He has garnered contagious funding from the National Eye Institute/National Institutes of Health over the past 23 years and has made significant advances in AMD research.

Literature and medical practices currently operate under the acceptance that AMD is a single, complex and progressive disease. Dr. Hageman's recent concept that AMD is multiple distinct diseases – if confirmed in future studies -- is expected to change thinking related to the development of treatments, diagnostics and the design of clinical trials for a disease that afflicts more than 30 million people worldwide. In addition, his discoveries are expected to alter research practices and methods.

Dr. Hageman's overall approach has been to examine the spectrum of early and late stage AMD phenotypes in study patients and donors who have substantial risk (homozygous) at the AMD-associated chromosome 1 locus, but who do not have any risk at the AMD-associated chromosome 10 locus and vice versa. This has been possible because of the Moran Eye Center's large resource of over 8,000 well-characterized study participants, additional patient cohorts ascertained by colleagues worldwide, and the world's largest collection of human donor eyes, now comprised of more than 4,500 pairs. 

Dr. Hageman joined the John A. Moran Eye Center in 2009 as Director of the Center for Translational Medicine (CTM) and partners with an elite corps of physicians and scientists. The goal of the CTM is the acceleration of the translation of basic scientific discoveries to clinically effective diagnostics and therapies for the treatment of devastating eye disorders such as age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma, as well as other diseases with shared etiologies. Through his work in the CTM, Dr. Hageman and his colleagues have made hallmark contributions to the understanding of AMD genetics.

"It is hoped that these discoveries will contribute to the development of viable early stage treatments for this devastating disease," said Dr. Hageman. 

Pisart Award

The Lighthouse International Pisart Vision Award was established in 1981 and is partially funded through a bequest of Mme. Georgette Pisart, a longtime Lighthouse volunteer.  This prestigious award carries a prize of $30,000 and a replica of the Pisart sculpture, originally designed by artist Gary Kleiman to represent the rods and cones of the eye. 

SOURCE Lighthouse International