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Research
Transforming glaucoma detection
Associate Professor Zhichao Wu’s project to improve glaucoma diagnosis and treatment has been recognised as one of the nation’s best.
Associate Professor Zhichao Wu’s project to improve glaucoma diagnosis and treatment has been recognised as one of the nation’s best.
Glaucoma is often referred to as the ‘silent thief of sight’ because many people don’t realise they have it until their vision has already been lost.
CERA Head of Clinical Biomarkers Research Associate Professor Zhichao Wu was working as a graduate optometrist when he first fully appreciated its impact.
“I found myself detecting eye disease that had already caused irreversible vision loss in people who had just come in for their routine eye test,” he says.
“It was terrible to me that we didn’t have better tools to catch it early.”
This motivated him to pursue glaucoma research with the goal of detecting the condition before significant irreversible vision loss happens.
While current glaucoma treatments are effective for many, around one third of people diagnosed with the disease still go on to lose vision.
This is because it is hard to accurately measure when the disease is worsening and to know when stronger treatments are needed.
The most common way to measure vision loss from glaucoma is a visual field test, which has a patient press a button when they see lights flash to find the edge of their sight.
However, it often takes multiple tests over years to measure just how quickly a person’s vision is decreasing.
“We ultimately want to help clinicians provide more personalised management of patients by developing better ways of detecting glaucoma progression,” says Associate Professor Wu.
“These tools are also critical for facilitating the discovery of treatments in glaucoma.”
In 2024, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) selected his research for their 10 of the Best Research Projects publication, which celebrates Australia’s top health and medical researchers.
New approaches for tackling glaucoma
Associate Professor Wu’s research received a boost in 2016 when he was awarded the prestigious NHMRC Early Career Fellowship.
Biomarkers are measures of biological processes that help diagnose conditions, understand the way diseases work, predict disease progression and evaluate treatment effectiveness.
His research sought to identify new biomarkers in glaucoma to improve how vision loss is prevented – and new treatments are developed – using advanced imaging and functional assessment techniques.
His research during the scholarship
has made progress towards detecting glaucoma progression earlier and finding better methods of identifying those at highest risk of progression, which also supports personalised management of this condition.
Associate Professor Wu is collaborating with CERA’s Ophthalmic Neuroscience team to further his research.
They’re harnessing the power of an advanced hyperspectral camera – that uses a spectrum of coloured light to image the eye – to help clinicians identify biomarkers of cells at risk of degeneration.
If these ‘high-risk’ patients can be identified, clinicians can then monitor them more carefully and get them the best treatment at the right time.
This research could also improve how clinical trials are run and bring new treatments to people quickly.
Because glaucoma typically progresses slowly, previous clinical trials have needed thousands of people over many years. However, Associate Professor Wu has managed to reduce the sample sizes of participants required for clinical trials by up to 20-fold using new methods and designs.
He is now extending this work by exploiting new technologies.
“By combining state-of-the-art OCT imaging with AI techniques, we aim to make glaucoma clinical trials even shorter and less costly to perform,” Associate Professor Wu says.
Associate Professor Wu and his team are working hard to ensure these research innovations can be translated into meaningful improvements for people living with glaucoma.
“Through earlier diagnosis, faster identification of disease progression and paving the way for therapeutic innovation, we hope to make blindness from glaucoma a thing of the past,” he says.