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Many current and past grand officers of the Grand Commandery of Ohio along with many
Constituent officers traveled to the Cole Eye Institute at the Cleveland Clinic to present a
$65,000 research grant check to Joseph Fogerty, Ph.D., to study a common blinding disorder
in children known as Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis (LCA)
Many children with LCA have limited
vision at birth, and most are severely
impaired by their first birthday. The retina
covers the back of the eye and converts the
light entering the eye into a nerve signal
that goes to the brain.
There are many different causes of LCA,
but in most cases, the rod and cone cells in
the retina die. Unfortunately, the body has no way to replace those cells once they are gone.
They will be studying zebrafish, small freshwater fish that you can find in a pet shop, because
unlike humans, these fish can regenerate neurons and replace the dead rods and cones. Their
goal is to understand how the fish regenerates their retinas so that they can perhaps one day
mimic the same process in LCA patients in order to restore vision.
The specific type of zebrafish they will be
studying, however, do not replace all of
their dying retina cells, and this makes them
a particularly helpful animal model for
LCA. By comparing regeneration-deficient
zebrafish to healthy zebrafish, they can
identify the molecular signals they lack that
are essential for complete regeneration. By
determining what signals are required to
trigger regeneration of the rods and cones in
zebrafish, it may be possible to translate this
information to humans where regeneration is
not currently possible.

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