How a bold partnership is shedding new light on childhood blindness. 

In the world of medical research, some of the most powerful breakthroughs begin not with a single genius working in a lab, but rather with a team of minds tackling questions together and daring to imagine bold, new possibilities. 

At Emory Eye Center, two longtime colleagues, Jeff Boatright and Michael Iuvone, both professors of ophthalmology, are proving that the best science is often a team sport. Their shared research, inspired by decades of collaboration and energized by a network of partners, is working to prevent a devastating outcome: blindness in premature infants. The condition is called retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) — and it’s one of the leading causes of blindness in children worldwide, with an estimate of more than 32,000 infants becoming blind or visually impaired annually.

When babies are born too early, their lungs and retinas aren’t fully developed. To survive, the infants receive supplemental oxygen. But while oxygen helps the lungs, it can unintentionally delay the natural growth of blood vessels in the retina. 

As these babies are removed from their incubation chambers, their retinas, starved for oxygen, send out a desperate signal for help. This causes a surge in fragile, haphazard blood vessel growth that can damage the eye and lead to vision loss or even detachment of the retina.  
 
For decades, doctors have tried to fine-tune oxygen delivery or use drugs and surgery to manage the condition, with mixed success. But Boatright and Iuvone, along with their collaborator Richard Lang — whose lab at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital investigates light-sensing pathways that regulate retinal-vascular development — are exploring something radically different: What if the solution lies in the light itself?

Their research focuses on atypical opsins: light-sensitive proteins in the eye that don’t contribute to vision per se but help regulate the body’s response to ambient light. These opsins, sensitive to specific wavelengths like blue and violet light, appear to play a role in how the eye develops blood vessels. Working with mouse models, the Emory team found that by adjusting the type and timing of light exposure, they could dramatically reduce the abnormal vessel growth associated with ROP.

“You walk into the room, and it just looks like normal light,” says Boatright. “But what we’re doing with that light is very precise, tuning its spectra just enough to influence how the retina and its vasculature develop. It’s subtle but powerful.”

Much of the foundational insight came from Iuvone’s earlier collaboration with Lang, who has pioneered innovative lighting systems at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. On the hospital’s roof, Lang’s team tracked the natural fluctuations of sunlight — day to night, season to season — and used that data to design lighting in neonatal intensive care units that mimics real-world conditions. The goal is to provide preemies with the environmental cues their developing bodies expect.

When Lang’s team shared some of these sunlight-mimicking lights with Boatright and Iuvone, the results in the lab were striking. “In some cases, the pathology was almost completely eliminated,” says Iuvone. “We had to double-check that the groups hadn’t been mixed up. It was that dramatic.”

What began with a $100,000 seed gift from philanthropist Alex Katz has since grown into a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded research program, laying the groundwork for future clinical trials at both Emory and Cincinnati Children’s. If all continues to go well, the team believes that trials could begin within the next few years, far faster than most research ever moves.

“The Trustees of the Katz Foundation believe that the most powerful thing private philanthropy can do is serve as a catalyst — sparking and nurturing ideas to be able to attract support from much larger sources like the NIH. That’s exactly what happened here,” Katz says. “We are proud to have supported Jeff Boatright and his team from the beginning and have followed their progress with tremendous anticipation. Their work is a shining example of how collaboration accelerates scientific discovery to improve the world around us.”

“This research is a textbook example of what collaborative science can do,” Boatright says. “Mike made the conceptual leap. Richard had the clinical access. I helped with the model. But none of us could have done it alone.”

Together, they are pushing toward a solution that could preserve sight for thousands of children every year.