The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund Venture Program has announced its first awards for the Development and Application of Imaging Technologies for Oculomics, or the Venture Program Oculomics Initiative. NIH plans to fund three awards with a combined total of up to $4.8 million per year over a period of three years (up to $1.6 million per year for each recipient), pending successful completion of milestones and availability of funds. 

The Venture Program Oculomics Initiative is one of two flagship Venture Initiatives, spearheading the Venture Program as a new form of Common Fund support, providing a framework for development of short-term projects with potential for significant, outsized impact, that are responsive to the shared priorities of NIH Institutes, Centers, and the Office of the Director. These initiatives emphasize brief, modest investments that can be implemented quickly in response to emerging opportunities, with a strong potential to accelerate science quickly.

The Venture Program Oculomics Initiative is a collaborative effort between the Common Fund and the National Eye Institute (NEI). Through Oculomics Initiative support, recipients will develop and apply novel, noninvasive eye imaging technologies, machine learning algorithms, and other tools to identify highly sensitive and specific biomarkers for diseases that affect the entire body.

Ocular (eye) imaging technologies provide a unique opportunity for development of methods to assess diabetes, hypertension, stroke, as well as neurodegenerative, coronary, inflammatory, metabolic, and renal diseases. If successful, these novel imaging techniques will have a significant impact on early detection of diseases before the onset of symptoms, and will help clinicians with early disease intervention, risk assessment, tracking disease progression, and supportive therapeutics. The noninvasive nature of the technologies and tools developed through the Venture Program Oculomics Initiative would provide the potential to deliver advanced healthcare to all communities, including rural and underserved communities, throughout the world.  

The new Venture Program Oculomics Initiative investigators and their institutions are:

• Amani A. Fawzi of Northwestern University and Stephen A. Burns of the Indiana University School of Optometry will develop Cellular-level Vascular Oculomics (CVO) technology to monitor systemic vascular health in real-time (OT2OD038128). 
• Vivek Jay Srinivasan and Laura Balcer of the New York University School of Medicine will develop and optimize next generation visible light optical coherence tomography (OCT) to detect biomarkers of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases (OT2OD038130). 
• Jinahua (Jay) Wang of the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Liang Liang of the University of Miami, and Yuhua Zhang of the Doheny Eye Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles, will work to create novel imaging techniques (award number) to identify precise changes in capillary function by measuring blood flow in retinal capillaries to detect Cerebral Small Vessel Disease (CSVD), a prevalent central nervous system disorder contributing to cognitive impairment and dementia (OT2OD038131).

To learn more about the Venture Program Oculomics Initiative, watch this informative video: 

To learn more about the Common Fund Venture Program, watch this informative video: 

Explore more information about this Initiative on the Common Fund Venture Program homepage and the Venture Program Oculomics Initiative Homepage. 

To stay up to date on the latest information, join the Venture Program Oculomics Initiative listserv.