Renowned retina researcher joins Brunson Center for Translational Vision Research

Internationally recognized retina researcher Frans Vinberg, PhD, has joined the UC Irvine Brunson Center for Translational Vision Research, drawn to the Gavin Herbert Eye Institute’s growing reputation and the promise of challenging new research opportunities to cure blindness.

“Not many research institutes have a trajectory like the Gavin Herbert Eye Institute has during the past five years,” says Vinberg.

Vinberg’s passionate pursuit of vision-saving research stems in part from personal  experience. His mother has myopia and glaucoma; his aunt has age-related macular degeneration. They have given him a poignant understanding of how progressive vision loss affects quality of life.

“My motivation is to try to find the cure for blindness,” he says. “The retina is one of the most complex parts of the nervous system and damage to it causes most forms of blindness. We have many treatments for the front of the eye, such as cataract surgery or cornea transplants. But we still don’t have clinical cures for the back of the eye, the retina.”

Vinberg developed an interest in vision science in his native Finland, where he earned a doctorate in biomedical engineering at Aalto University. While researching the biophysics of cell membranes, he recorded the light response from retina tissues in animals. Out of necessity, he and his advisor often built their own research devices — a hands-on approach that later led him to invent and patent new instruments.

In 2016, while at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Vinberg earned a prestigious National Institutes of Health award for promising postdoctoral students transitioning to faculty roles. The grant funded his work recording light responses in the central retina — the region responsible for sharp, detailed vision — but in eyes no longer attached to a living body, a breakthrough in the study of human vision.

In 2022, his groundbreaking paper in Nature showed for the first time that human photoreceptor cells continue to sense light and produce electrical signals, even several hours postmortem, challenging longstanding assumptions about the limits of human retinal tissue.

This research and his related work as a faculty member at the University of Utah, enabled Vinberg to start a company named Eyescreen, Inc. It is developing a platform and assays for preclinical drug testing for ophthalmic diseases using donated human eyes, with funding from the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research program.

“Animal models do not translate well to the human eye, so it’s very important that we have other ways to test delivery, efficacy and even safety of different treatments,” he says. “Eyescreen allows researchers and pharmaceutical companies to test drugs and, hopefully, develop new treatments.”

Vinberg is currently pursuing opportunities to use the company’s platform to test gene-editing therapies to treat blindness that are being developed in the Program for Precision Genome Editing led by Krzysztof Palczewski, MD, PhD, at the Brunson center.

His research spans multiple frontiers in vision restoration, including reversing blindness caused by loss of blood flow to the eye due to blocked arteries or other ischemic injuries. A paper he and University of Utah colleagues published recently in Science Advances lays the foundation for preclinical studies to treat central retina artery occlusion, which usually results in blindness.

He is also part of a team of U.S. researchers working across multiple institutions to develop techniques and processes to restore vision through whole-eye transplants, with federal funding from ARPA-H. Vinberg stresses that none of this work is possible without organ donor societies. He is collaborating with organizations across Southern California to strengthen networks and infrastructure that enable people to donate their eyes after death — an essential step in his efforts to cure blindness.