On-site PhD conferral Ilona Liesenborghs

Keywords: ophthalmology, corticosteroid-induced increase in eye pressure, glaucoma, bioinformatics

"Genetic and molecular pathogenesis of primary open angle glaucoma and corticosteroid-induced glaucoma ‘Applications of research with omics data in ophthalmology"

Within this thesis, we investigated which molecular processes play a role in the functioning of the healthy trabecular meshwork and the pathogenesis of primary open angle glaucoma and a corticosteroid-induced increase in eye pressure. The past decades, other researchers created enormous amounts of omics data. By using bioinformatics these biological data can be enriched by combining and reanalyzing the existing data. In addition, we performed the largest genome-wide association study (GWAS) until now in which small genetic variations (SNPs) between patients with and without an increase in ocular pressure after the use of corticosteroids were compared.

Research focused on the pathogenesis of glaucoma and corticosteroid-induced increase in eye pressure are necessary to develop new treatment options. The findings that are presented in this thesis are relevant for this purpose. In addition, for some studies, we only used freely available online tools. The methods presented in this thesis can therefore easily be used by other researchers and for other purposes.

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Language: English