May 18, 2006
Futterman lecture: ‘Retinal remodeling’
Dr. Robert Marc, an expert on how neurons in the retina remodel their circuitry when rods and cones, the photoreceptor cells, die because of inherited disease or injury, will give the 21st annual Sidney Futterman Memorial Lecture for the Department of Ophthalmology.
He will speak on “Retinal Remodeling” at 10 a.m., Thursday, May 25, in room T-747 of the Health Sciences Center. The lecture is open to the public.
Marc, now at the Moran Eye Institute of the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City, has developed methods for determining what happens to inner retinal neurons and blia and their interactions when the photoreceptor cells begin to die.
In a gradual, but predictable, series of steps, the loss of photoreceptor cells and their synaptic signaling leads to profound changes in the other cells involved in vision.
His results are significant for researchers working to develop gene therapies or electronic devices that might restore vision in people blinded by genetic disease.
Marc’s careful studies of the degeneration of the retina also are generally applicable to other neurodegenerative processes.
The lecture is named for Dr. Sidney Futterman, a member of the faculty in the Department of Ophthalmology from 1966 until his death in 1979.
