Vallabh Das
University of Houston, TX·Neuroscience
About 5% of children develop strabismus, a misalignment of the eyes. Amblyopia, sometimes called lazy eye, impairs vision in one eye in over two million U.S.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
strabismus
amblyopia
lazy eye
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2029
What they work on
- Test whether a competition between brain signals explains how strabismic monkeys choose which eye to use, recording from the frontal eye fields during a double-step target task.
- Test whether injecting a low dose of tetrodotoxin (TTX), a nerve-blocking toxin, into the good eye restores vision in monkeys with amblyopia, at two ages, doses and frequencies, against sham and reverse-patching controls.
- Determine whether TTX injection is safe, using visual evoked potentials, electroretinography, eye imaging with optical coherence tomography, and tissue analysis of the eye and brain.
- Provide custom research software and programming consultation for vision scientists through the Research Computer Programming Module of a vision research core.
More about the research
children. Both conditions arise when normal visual development is disrupted early in life. The lab uses monkey models of these disorders to understand the brain circuits that coordinate the two eyes, and to test a new treatment for amblyopia before it is tried in people.
Why it matters
Patching the good eye is the standard treatment for amblyopia. If temporarily silencing that eye with a low dose of tetrodotoxin proves safe and effective in monkeys, it could become a basis for a new treatment for children with amblyopia. Understanding how strabismic patients direct their gaze could guide more rationally designed therapies for eye misalignment.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nimesh Patel
University of Houston, TX·Neuroscience
Test whether baseline retinal vascular volume and blood-flow variability, measured with OCTA (a 3D blood-flow scan), predict the rate of disease progression in non-human primates with experimental glaucoma.
Donald Miller
Indiana University, IN·Biomedical Engineering
Measure the spectral sensitivity, or color response, of individual photoreceptors in the living human eye using adaptive-optics optical coherence tomography (AO-OCT) with phase-sensitive detection.
Jianhua Cang
University of Virginia, VA·Neuroscience
Confirm that Cbln4-positive neurons in the mouse superficial superior colliculus are inhibitory and direction selective, map their shape and connections, and manipulate them to test whether they adjust motion responses based on surrounding context.
The school
University of Houston: 21 labs on PI Pages, $239M a year on research, 374 research doctorates a year.
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