Cherrell Price Receives Medical Student Eye Research Fellowship

March 7, 2023

Cherrell Price, a third-year medical student at
Morehouse School of Medicine and a 2021 alumna of
Harvard Ophthalmology’s Research Scholars Program,
is the recipient of the Research to Prevent Blindness
(RPB) Medical Student Eye Research Fellowship. This
fellowship allows gifted students to take a year off from
medical school and devote time to the pursuit of a research project within an
RPB-supported department of ophthalmology.
Price will join Harvard Ophthalmology for a one-year Inherited Retinal
Degenerations Research Fellowship under the mentorship of Mass Eye and
4
Ear faculty members Rachel Huckfeldt and Kinga Bujakowska to study retinitis
pigmentosa. Mutations in the EYS gene are a leading cause of retinitis
pigmentosa; however, the gene is relatively large, exceeding the capacity of
current gene therapy delivery systems. As an alternative to gene therapy, Price
will work with Bujakowska and postdoctoral research fellow Eglė GaldikaitėBrazienė to evaluate exon skipping as a therapeutic approach in zebrafish and
human retinal organoid models of EYS-associated retinitis pigmentosa. Exon
skipping involves the use of technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9 or antisense
oligonucleotides to skip over mutated regions of the gene so that production of
functional protein can be restored.