February 2024 AMANI FAWZI, MD, INDUCTED INTO THE ASCIAmani Fawzi, MD, the Cyrus Tang and Lee Jampol professor of Ophthalmology at Northwestern Medicine, has been inducted into the American Society for Clinical Investigation, one of the nation’s oldest medical honor societies and composed of more than 3,000 physician-scientists.
Dr. Fawzi is one of four Northwestern Medicine faculty members that have been inducted into the ASCI. Three additional Northwestern Medicine faculty members have also been honored with the ASCI Young Physician-Scientist Award, which recognizes physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research. “To be inducted to ASCI, as a member of a very small group of ophthalmologist members, is such a great honor,” says Dr. Fawzi. Dr. Fawzi’s research uses translational approaches to study age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, both major causes of vision loss. Her work particularly focuses on using high-resolution and functional retinal imaging, techniques used in her most recent study published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, where she used high-resolution imaging to visualize and characterize the timeline for vascular cell loss in diabetic retinopathy in living human eyes. “Our results represent a major advance in our understanding of vascular mural cell compromise in diabetes. We discovered that these vascular supporting cells begin to disappear from the retinal blood vessels very early on, well before any other clinical manifestations of diabetes,” Dr. Fawzi explains. “We believe our findings will stimulate the field towards developing early interventions to preserve these cells and that using imaging technology, we can monitor the impact of such treatments on the health of these critical cells in the living eye and ultimately prevent vision loss in diabetes.” Her research has also advocated for early monitoring of age-related macular degeneration. In an additional study published in PLoS One, her team provided evidence that identifying early-stage disease, which involves identifying newly formed blood vessels invading the retina called choroidal neovascularization, may help prevent disease progression. “Once these lesions are identified in an eye, we insist on seeing the patient on a more stringent follow-up schedule, and we use the OCT angiography technology at each of these visits,” Dr. Fawzi says. “This heightened vigilance allows us to detect the exudative conversion, which occurs in about one-fifth of these eyes, a lot more readily.” Most recently, Dr. Fawzi’s work was supported by a $75,000 grant from the International Research Collaborators Award from Research to Prevent Blindness. The grant will support a multitude of scientific collaborations at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and beyond that have the potential to accelerate the development of treatments for blinding disorders. This article was originally published in the Feinberg School of Medicine News Center on February 9, 2024. |
Amani A Fawzi, MD, the Cyrus Tang and Lee Jampol professor of Ophthalmology, professor of Ophthalmology
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