With an $8 million gift to the Eye Center last week, officials can now proceed with infrastructure and academic plans to take the Department of Ophthalmology, already an elite program, to an even more respected plateau.
Dr. David Epstein, who has served as the department's chair for the past 10 years, said the gift will fund more space for two areas of research--glaucoma and macular degeneration.
The department has stagnated in the national rankings because of a lack of space, Epstein said. The Ophthalmology Times recently named Duke in a five-way tie as the sixth best eye center in the nation; U.S. News and World Report last July ranked the center eighth.
"We've been kind of stuck there basically because all our scientists are funded, we're filling our the space, and we were full," Epstein said.
The new Herbert and Ruth Albert Eye Research Institute, which administrators hope to complete in 2004, will be built alongside and connect to the Wadsworth Building on Erwin Road, which currently houses the Eye Center.
The new five-story building, projected to cost $17.5 million, comprises a significant chunk of the Eye Center's $40 million goal in Duke's $2 billion capital campaign. The center has raised over $30 million of that goal.
The building will include two floors for research space, a shared floor for academic space and clinical laboratories, a large auditorium, a resource center and an expanded pediatric eye care service.
Epstein said the extra research space would allow the center to hire more researchers over the next five years. In the future, a second phase of construction would include another building in front of the Wadsworth Building for more clinical space, underground parking, and more amenities for patients.
The Eye Center plans to use the added space to investigate the causes of glaucoma and macular degeneration, two diseases that cause blindness.
"I think not only is the research in the Eye Center exciting in its own right, but it fits quite nicely on the emphasis in genomics," said Dr. Sandy Williams, dean of the School of Medicine. "Genomics offer the promise of trying to develop causes [for diseases]."
Epstein said glaucoma therapies are on the horizon and may involve pharmacological remedies or replacing proteins that contain the genetic codes that cause various forms of the disorder.
Glaucoma is a group of eye diseases that gradually steals sight, often without symptoms. Vision loss is caused by damage to the optic nerve, sometimes by high pressure within the eye.
Epstein said researchers are working on drugs that would change the cytoskeleton of eye cells, so that pressure would be regulated more regularly. Dr. Dennis Rickman, an assistant professor of ophthalmology, is working with stem cells to reconstruct damaged parts of the optic nerves.
Macular degeneration, however, is more difficult because researchers still have to discover which genes trigger the disorder, Epstein said. The disorder causes the light-sensing cells of the macula to mysteriously malfunction and cease to work over time.
Dr. Catherine Bowes Rickman, an assistant professor of ophthalmology, said the disorder is much like Alzheimer's disease.
"They are both late dependent diseases, they involve deposits forming, both have environmental and genetic factors. A whole lot of things are similar with them."
She added that the Eye Center has worked with Dr. Margaret Pericak-Vance, professor and director of the Center for Human Genetics, to look for similarities.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.