Early biomarkers of retinal injury in rat optic nerve crush and blunt injury models of ocular trauma.

Abstract

Purpose : After retinal injury, numerous disease processes and cellular pathways combine leading to retinal cell death and eventual loss of sight. We aim to identify potential biomarkers for retinal injury that are common to both vitreous and retinal samples after rat optic nerve crush and blunt injury models of ocular trauma respectively. Identification of such markers will act to direct targeted treatments in the clinic, in addition to directing future research into novel therapeutics targeting the identified pathways.

Methods : 10 Sprague Dawley rats underwent bilateral optic nerve crush. After 24 hours, the animals were killed by cervical dislocation and serum, vitreous and retina were immediately collected and snap frozen in liquid nitrogen for processing. Retina and vitreous were homogenised by sonication in lysis buffer. The lysates were analysed using the R&D Proteome Profiler Rat XL Cytokine Array kit and the Milliplex MAP Total Akt/mTOR Magnetic Bead Kit which are both capable of detecting the relative change in protein expression levels of multiple proteins simultaneously.

Results : Lipocalin-2 concentrations were found to increase four-fold after optic nerve crush injury consistent with retinal injury and IGFBP-3, RBP4, CCL2 & 3 and MMP-3 concentrations doubled. The majority of the 79 cytokines studied did not change significantly indicating that retinal injury response triggers a conserved inflammatory response.

Conclusions : Here we have identified a number of novel biomarkers for retinal injury. Future work will be directed at further characterising their potential use as early markers to guide clinical treatment.

This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.