Congratulating Lauren Ayton on her NHMRC Investigator Grant

Dr Lauren Ayton pictured in front of optometry equipmentMSHS would like to congratulate Dr Lauren Ayton of the Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences on her award of an NHMRC Investigator grant. The funding allows Dr Ayton to bring her research in “Saving Sight Through Novel BioTech Innovations for Inherited Retinal Disease” to life over five years.

This highly competitive program will provide over $1.5M of funding to Dr Ayton’s program, enabling her to further her research into inherited retinal disease (IRD).

The project will build a clinical research database of people with IRD, discover more about the links between genes and eye disease, develop new outcome measures to be used in clinical trials, and support world-first clinical trials for IRD in Australia.

This research program has four main goals:

  1. To generate essential natural history data on the progression of IRDs, in order to assist with patient selection and assessment in clinical trials
  2. To investigate the genomic correlations with disease pathogenesis and response to clinical therapies;
  3. To continue my internationally-leading work in the development and validation of novel outcome measures for use in IRD clinical trials
  4. To lead the clinical assessments in locally-developed IRD treatments, including a gene therapy clinical trial.