Many people are only diagnosed with glaucoma after having lost a significant portion of their vision. Even after diagnosis, people with glaucoma can still become blind despite treatment.

CERA Head of Clinical Biomarkers Associate Professor Zhichao Wu has received national recognition for his work to more effectively monitor and identify glaucoma.

In 2024, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) selected his research for their prestigious 10 of the Best publication, which celebrates success stories of health and medical research funded by the Australian Government. 

He was also named Optometrist of the Year in 2024 by Optometry Victoria South Australia for almost a decade of contributing to reducing the impact of eye disease.

Significant impact

Associate Professor Wu was working as a graduate optometrist when he first fully appreciated the impact of glaucoma.

“I found myself detecting eye disease that had already caused irreversible vision loss in people who had just come in for their routine eye test,” he says. 

“It was terrible to me that we could miss it, and that we just didn’t have better tools to catch it early.” 

This motivated him to pursue glaucoma research with the overarching goal of enabling earlier detection of this condition – before significant irreversible vision loss happens.

His research received a boost in 2016 when he was awarded the prestigious NHMRC Early Career Fellowship to support his research to find better ways to detect and measure vision loss.

With support from this fellowship during this crucial point in his career, he has developed novel statistical approaches, trial designs and outcome measures that can reduce the sample sizes of participants required for clinical trials by up to 20-fold.

He is now extending this work by collaborating with CERA’s Ophthalmic Neuroscience team to use cutting edge imaging technology to discover new biomarkers – biological processes that help diagnose conditions, understand the way diseases work, predict disease progression and evaluate treatment effectiveness. 

They’re harnessing the power of an advanced hyperspectral camera – that uses a wide spectrum of different coloured light to reveal many details of the eye – to help identify biomarkers of cells at risk of dying.

Better impact

If these ‘high-risk’ patients can be identified, clinicians can then monitor them more carefully and treat them more intensively as appropriate. 

This research could also make clinical trials more feasible to run – bringing new treatments to patients.

“By combining state-of-the-art OCT imaging with AI techniques, we aim to make glaucoma clinical trials shorter and much less costly to run,” Associate Professor Wu says.

Associate Professor Wu and the Clinical Biomarkers team are working hard to ensure these research innovations can be translated into the clinic – and into meaningful improvements for people living with glaucoma. 

“Through earlier diagnosis, faster identification of disease progression and paving the way for therapeutic innovation, we hope to make blindness from glaucoma a thing of the past,” he says. 

This story was originally published in Share our vision: Annual Review 2024.