Dr Osamah Saeedi receiving his award from Dr Christopher Girkin at ARVO

Associate Professor Osamah Saeedi, director of clinical research at the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, was awarded the Heidelberg Engineering 2018 Xtreme Research Award.

A/Prof Saeedi won the award for a novel technique he has developed, allowing individual red blood cells to be labelled with the fluorescent dye indocyanine green (ICG) so their in-vivo movement can be studied. He presented his work in a lecture entitled ‘Beyond Angiography: In Vivo Imaging of Ocular Erythrocytes’ at the award ceremony at this year’s Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) meeting in Hawaii in April.

While his research is still in its early stages, the dynamics of individual erythrocytes may reveal undiscovered information about the physiological and biological processes at a cellular level within the eye, said Ali Tafreshi, clinical research director at Heidelberg Engineering. “These new discoveries may shed new light on important aspects of ocular haemodynamics such as oxygenation and flow speed, allowing for improvement and/or validation of technologies such as OCT angiography.

“Although Dr Saeedi’s main area of interest is glaucoma, his research is laying the groundwork for future studies that may reveal new and important diagnostic parameters for ocular and even systemic diseases.”