Ditte Kamille Rasmussen
DARE: Sights trained on a common eye disease and aimed at a protein associated with blindness
She won’t be researching “blindly” but is travelling to San Francisco to train her sights on a particular protein, HTRA1, which is the most common cause of loss of sight in the elderly.
AMD is an eye disease that affects one in ten Danes over the age of 75 and is the most common cause of blindness in Denmark. Patients experience loss of sight in the central field of vision, blurring and distortion of images. Treatment is complicated and typically involves repeated injections directly into the eye. This merely retards development of the disease but rarely cures it. And, of course, it’s never nice to have someone stick a needle in your eye!
The disease is caused by many different factors, both genetic and environmental. However, some families have a particularly high risk of developing AMD due to genetic mutations that increase levels of the HTRA1 protein.
‘This is the protein on which my project is based. The idea is that if too much HTRA1 results in a high risk of developing AMD, we may be able to design a medicine to reduce the amount of HTRA1 and to use this as a treatment,’ Rasmussen explains.
In Vinit Mahajan’s laboratory at Stanford, they have succeeded in getting stem cells to develop into exactly the type of eye cell in which AMD is found. They have created a mutation in the gene for HTRA1 so that it becomes overactive in the same way as it does in families with a high risk of AMD.
Rasmussen will use these cells in an attempt to design and test a new medicine to reduce amounts of HTRA1, and this will hopefully lead to a treatment for AMD.
‘I’ve really been looking forward to working in an eye unit that conducts research at such a high level. The project is extremely exciting, and I’m thrilled to have been given the opportunity to continue my research over here, supported by a DARE fellowship,’ says Rasmussen, whose Danish supervisor is Rikke Nielsen, associate professor at the Department of Biomedicine, Aarhus University.
Ditte Kamille Rasmussen, 25, is studying medicine at Aarhus University and has completed her tenth semester. She only has a couple of years left before she can call herself a doctor. She is one of five Danish medical students who have travelled to the USA with the Lundbeck Foundation's DARE (Danish American Research Exchange) programme. Rasmussen will spend the year on her studies and on research at Stanford University in California – one of the world’s most prestigious universities.
