ARVO/Alcon early career clinician-scientist research award winners announced

The ARVO Foundation for Eye Research, a supporting non-profit of The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), announced the recipients of the 2007 ARVO/Alcon early career clinician-scientist research awards.

Designed to recognize the importance of clinician-scientists in the ophthalmic research community, the awards are given based on the quality of each recipient's research presented at the ARVO annual meeting. The awardees, who receive grants of $3,000 each, are clinicians with an academic faculty or comparable appointment committed to a career with protected research time. They also work or have previously worked under the guidance of a mentor.

This year's recipients and the abstracts on which the awards are based are:

• Nitza Goldenberg-Cohen, MD, Schneider Children's Medical Center, Shoham, Israel, "Enhanced neuronal differentiation of bone marrow-derived stem cells in ischemic retina."

• Andras M. Komaromy, DVM, PhD, University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, Philadelphia, "Cone-directed gene therapy with rAAV leads to restoration of cone function in a canine model of achromatopsia."

• Rainer A. Leitgeb, PhD, Ecole Polytechnique Federale, Lausanne, Switzerland, "Macular pigment optical density, serum C-reactive protein, and serum lutein and zeaxanthin in age-related maculopathy (ARM)."

• Malin Malmsjo, MD, PhD, Lund University, Sweden, "Retinal ischemia reperfusion: a new animal model suitable for experimental analysis of the retinal arteries."

• Takahiro Suzuki, MD, PhD, Tokai University School of Medicine, Ishehara, Japan, "Improvement of pathological neovascularization and astrocyte abnormalities in a mouse model of oxygen-induced retinopathy by augmenting bone marrow-derived endothelial progenitor cell recruitment via link deletion."

Funded by a donation to the foundation from Alcon Laboratories, the awards were presented Sunday during the ARVO/Alcon keynote session.