06/14/2024
Cleveland Clinic to investigate biomarker testing for using autologous serum eye drops
Daniel Rotroff, PhD (front right) with lab members including Research Associate Courtney Hershberger, PhD (front left), who will head the research project under his mentorship.
A team of Cleveland Clinic researchers and physicians are teaming up to create a biomarker test that will predict whether a patient will benefit from autologous eye drops, otherwise known as serum tears.
Serum tears are a personalized form of artificial tears designed to help people living with severe chronic eye pain from dry eye or following cataract surgery. Components in serum isolated from blood are similar enough to the molecules found in tears that they can help lubricate and heal the eyes. Serum tears can be a powerful source of relief for individuals suffering from chronic eye pain. However, the treatment only works in half of patients.
"The process of making autologous eye drops is very time-intensive and involved for both my patients and my team and the treatments aren't always covered by insurance," says Rony Sayegh, MD, an ophthalmologist with Cleveland Clinic's Cole Eye Institute. "If there were a test to determine their response before treatment, we could spare non-responders a lot of time and money."
Dr. Sayegh and Director of the Center for Quantitative Metabolic Research Daniel Rotroff, PhD, are leading efforts to develop testing for serum tear outcomes. They were awarded $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health for the first step of making this test: figuring out what physicians can measure to identify responders and non-responders. The project started in 2024.
Dr. Rotroff's research team will analyze samples from the eyes and blood of individuals receiving serum tears to identify molecules and other factors that correlate with responsiveness. The team will then conduct tests to determine whether these factors, called biomarkers, can predict which patients would be good candidates for autologous serum tears.
The Rotroff lab will also use their findings to learn more about post-surgery eye pain, dry eye and serum tears in general.
"The biomedical field doesn't fully understand how these treatments actually work or what parts of the serum help the eye, but any molecule that changes in response to treatment has the potential to be involved in the biological processes behind it all," Dr. Rotroff explains. "We hope to identify molecules that will predict which patients will benefit from this treatment while improving our understanding of what causes their pain to discover better treatments."
