Fortenbach Lab

The Fortenbach Lab studies how the retina encodes light — and how to give that encoding back when disease takes it away. We are a vision-restoration lab, with a particular focus on photopharmacology: synthetic, light-activated small molecules delivered by intravitreal injection that bind to surviving cells in a degenerated retina and confer new light sensitivity to the tissue.

This approach is now far enough along that early-phase clinical trials have demonstrated restored vision in human subjects with severe retinal degeneration. The questions in front of us — and the ones the lab is built to answer — are no longer whether photoswitches can restore vision, but what kind of vision they restore, and what we can do to make that vision better.

Our work spans two threads:

• Mechanism. What does photoswitch-mediated light sensitivity actually look like at the level of single retinal neurons and downstream circuits? We use whole-cell patch clamp and multi-electrode array recordings, combined with machine-learning analysis of population responses, to map how photoswitches encode visual information in retinas at different stages of degeneration.
• Translational optimization. Given those mechanistic constraints, how do we improve the perceptual quality of restored vision? This is where the lab’s clinical vantage point — vitreoretinal surgery practice at UW Medicine — keeps the bench questions tethered to what actually limits patients.

The lab is part of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Washington, located in the Vision Science Center in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. We focus on retinal degenerative diseases, especially retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration.

Joining the lab

The lab is actively recruiting at all levels — postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates with backgrounds in vision science, neuroscience, biophysics, chemical biology, bioengineering, or medicine. See the join page for details on what we are looking for and how to get in touch.

Get in touch

Email is the fastest way to reach me — see the icon below. For prospective trainees, please include a short note on your background and what scientific question you most want to work on; this helps me give you a more useful reply.