Magdalena Renner leads the Human Organoid Platform at IOB. Together with her team she is optimizing the culture of retinal organoids as a model for the human retina and retinal disease. She is particularly interested in enabling the mass production of retinal organoids and other cell types of the human eye to facilitate high-content compound screening and testing of novel gene therapy tools.
Renner is also the recipient of the Swiss OphthAWARD Best Experimental Work (2021), the PRO RETINA award of RETINA Suisse and PRO RETINA Germany (2021) and won the 1st place of the VSY Biotechnology Ophthalmology Star Award (2021).
Recipients of the Bert M. Glaser, MD Award must demonstrate their work has led to the development of a new drug or technique that will revolutionize retina care. Renner and her team have developed a method to generate thousands of artificial human retinas (retinal organoids) from human pluripotent stem cells.
"We compared retinal organoids to post-mortem human retina and analyzed their cell type-diversity, morphology, light-responses and gene-expression," says Renner. "Importantly, we analyzed which cell types express known disease genes in both human retina and retinal organoids which validates retinal organoids as a promising new model to study retinal disease."
Funded by the Glaser family through the ARVO Foundation, the $10,000 award is named in memory of Bert M. Glaser, MD, a long-time retina researcher, surgeon, innovator and teacher whose life was cut short in 2017 after a brief illness.