A total of 39 investigators and faculty members of which 23 have NIH grants, the large majority through the Department of Ophthalmology and the Francis I. Proctor Foundation for Research in Ophthalmology, request core vision research support for a broad program with its major emphasis on important clinical problems in vision. This is a multi-disciplinary, integrated effort of vision investigators with faculty appointments in the Departments of Ophthalmology, Physiology, Anatomy, Medicine, Pathology, Pediatrics, Neurology, Surgery, and Neurologic Surgery. We consider the entire Vision Research Program encompassed by this application as clinically relevant research, defined as research on animals, tissues, cells, or cellular components, that has potential for adding to our understanding of the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of human eye diseases and visual disorders. A major goal of our multi-disciplinary approach is to foster investigative collaboration and to assure that clinical investigators understand laboratory methodology and that laboratory scientists understand actual clinical problems. Five core modules are requested covering key technical personnel to support (1) human ocular tissue and cell culture, (2) experimental microsurgery, (3) electron microscopy, (4) microbiology/immunology, and (5) biostatistics. Each module will provide services and facilities otherwise unavailable to individual investigators, and each will be broadly used by many different investigators in our group. Because of the development of the Beckman Vision Center and its Koret Vision Research Laboratory here during the past three years, the next five years of our core vision research grant should be exciting and particularly productive. Development of our new laboratories has been successful in significant measure because of facilitation and enhancements of our programs provided through our core vision research grant support in the past.
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