5 Key Takeaways

• 1

  The National Eye Institute awarded the University of Texas at Arlington a $1.96 million grant for a 4-year project developing AI-powered tools to study ocular health and disease.

• 2

  Led by Xinlei (Sherry) Wang with Lin Xu of UT Southwestern Medical Center, the project combines expertise in statistics, bioinformatics, omics, and ocular biology.

• 3

  One tool will use scalable algorithms to analyze genomic datasets and identify transcriptional regulators associated with ocular health and disease.

• 4

  A second tool will computationally separate cell-type signals in whole-tissue samples to investigate cell-specific regulatory activity without single-cell experiments for every regulator.

• 5

  The researchers aim to integrate tissue-level and cell-type analyses to identify regulatory pathways for further study of eye disease mechanisms and potential diagnostic and therapeutic targets.