Modeling myopia control at the crossroads of optics and retinal neurobiology – MyopiaMaster

The global burden of myopia is growing, affecting nearly 30% of the world population in 2020 and expected to rise to 50% by 2050. For a significant fraction of myopic patients, there is an associated risk of sight threatening myopia-related pathologies, such as glaucoma, myopic macular degeneration and retinal detachment.
Myopia is due to excessive eye growth. A striking result, established across the literature is that eye growth is strongly affected by the visual input that enters the eye and reaches the retina. Recently, several studies have shown that it is possible to use this feature to slow down eye growth, and therefore myopia progression. For this they use novel optical designs that slow down eye growth while maintaining visual comfort. EssilorLuxottica is already a key actor on these technologies, and intends to maintain decisive scientific and technologic competitive edges in myopia control solutions facing competing actors in China, Japan and in the USA.
A major factor limiting progress in the design of these solutions is the lack of understanding of the mechanisms of myopia. A rational design strategy is needed, making progress on our understanding of the retinal mechanisms of eye growth to find novel optical designs to slow eye growth as much as possible. The purpose of this project is to understand better how the retina can be modulated by different optical transformations imposed by the lens and by the optics of the eye, and how it will in turn modulate eye growth.
It is still unclear how different optical transformations of the visual input can modulate differently eye growth. While it is established that retinal activity will have an impact on eye growth, we don’t know how optical transformations of natural stimuli modulate retinal activity. In particular, most of the studies so far have been performed in vivo, and this does not allow to probe the impact of different optical transformations on the retinal activity. We need to understand how the retina processes optical transformations of natural stimuli, something not known, and separate it from the impact of the eye optics themselves.
In this project, we will characterize how the retina responds to optical transformations of natural stimuli using both experiments and modeling. Our purpose is to develop a model that predicts how optical transformations modulate eye growth, to find the best design minimizing eye growth. We will first record and model how ganglion cells in the mouse retina respond to natural stimuli shaped by various optical corrections. A key issue is to understand how the retina can distinguish between an image focused in front or behind the retina, and therefore drives eye growth in opposite directions. We will build a data based model to predict ganglion cell responses to optical transformations of natural stimuli, and translate it to the human retina. The same characterization will also be performed on the retina of myopic mice, to test if there are differences in the information processing of normal and myopic retinas. Finally, we will build on these results and record the activity of specific interneurons in the retina that receive the same input as ganglion cells, and are responsible for slowing down eye growth. We will use imaging techniques to record their responses and refine our models to reproduce their activity. This project will thus give us a mathematical model connecting optical correction and eye growth, that we will use to predict the impact on myopia progression of different lens optical designs.
EssilorLuxottica (EL) and the Institut de la Vision (IdV) will join forces with their unique and complementary expertises in optics and retinal processing, respectively, and work in an integrated manner. Together, they hope to bring novel solutions to slow down myopia progression and solve this important public health, economical and societal problem.