John B Troy

Dr. Troy has been engaged in neuroscience research for more than 30 years, investigating the functional properties of neurons of the retina and lateral geniculate nucleus of cat, monkey, mouse and rat.  He has also investigated how different classes of retinal ganglion cell tile the retina.  The underlying theme of this work has been to arrive at a full quantitative description of how retinal ganglion and lateral geniculate cells encode visual information in mammals, including the human being. Recently, Dr. Troy has expanded this effort to consider how the retina changes in disease states and what can be done to retard or reverse these changes.  He has been collaborating with Dr. Xiaorong Liu in a study of ocular hypertension.  Using a mouse model of glaucoma, they are investigating the progression of the disease and some drug treatments that might be effective in delaying or halting its progression.

More recently, Dr. Troy has expanded his interest to include technology development that can be used either to restore neural function or to assist neuroscience research, including the development of therapeutic agents.  His laboratory has provided insight into how stimulus waveforms can be shaped to minimize tissue and electrode damage during electrical stimulation. His laboratory has also developed a new version of the patch clamp electrode which should permit longer term stable recordings of higher bandwidth than existing models. The Troy laboratory has also been collaborating with Dr. Laxman Saggere and his students to develop a chemical neural prosthesis for diseases of photoreceptor degeneration.  Under ideal conditions, this prosthesis would be implanted in the subretina following photoreceptor degeneration.  If this can be accomplished, advantage can be made of the surviving retinal circuitry.  One of the major challenges faced is to engineer a device that is flexible, photoactivated and which can incorporate a sufficiently large reservoir of neurotransmitter.  This device is targeted for patients with the incurable diseases retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration, with incidences of 1-2 and 20-25 million.  Finally, Dr. Troy has recently begun a new project to develop a thalamic visual prosthesis.  The goal is to implant electrodes into the lateral geniculate nucleus bilaterally to treat patients blinded through glaucoma, optic neuritis or bilateral eye loss. There are 60 million worldwide with glaucoma, 2-5 million with optic neuritis and 2 million with bilateral eye loss.