{"doi":"10.7554/elife.60831","title":"Anti-fibrotic activity of a rho-kinase inhibitor restores outflow function and intraocular pressure homeostasis","abstract":"Glucocorticoids are widely used as an ophthalmic medication. A common, sight-threatening adverse event of glucocorticoid usage is ocular hypertension, caused by dysfunction of the conventional outflow pathway. We report that netarsudil, a rho-kinase inhibitor, decreased glucocorticoid-induced ocular hypertension in patients whose intraocular pressures were poorly controlled by standard medications. Mechanistic studies in our established mouse model of glucocorticoid-induced ocular hypertension show that netarsudil both prevented and reduced intraocular pressure elevation. Further, netarsudil attenuated characteristic steroid-induced pathologies as assessed by quantification of outflow function and tissue stiffness, and morphological and immunohistochemical indicators of tissue fibrosis. Thus, rho-kinase inhibitors act directly on conventional outflow cells to prevent or attenuate fibrotic disease processes in glucocorticoid-induced ocular hypertension in an immune-privileged environment. Moreover, these data motivate the need for a randomized prospective clinical study to determine whether netarsudil is indeed superior to first-line anti-glaucoma drugs in lowering steroid-induced ocular hypertension.","journal":"eLife","year":2021,"id":153859,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":66,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9482,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":570924,"name":"Chan-Young Lee","orcid":"0000-0001-6484-6871","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":336414,"name":"A. Thomas Read","orcid":"0000-0002-2764-6413","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":652130,"name":"Ke Wang","orcid":"0000-0002-1763-6385","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":652131,"name":"Jung‐Min Ha","orcid":"0000-0002-6932-8659","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":652820,"name":"Megan Kuhn","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":392993,"name":"Iris Navarro","orcid":"0000-0002-7806-7729","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":571833,"name":"Jenny Cui","orcid":null,"position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":426840,"name":"Katherine Young","orcid":"0000-0001-6567-3335","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":570925,"name":"Rahul Gorijavolu","orcid":"0000-0002-4386-957X","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":400471,"name":"Todd Sulchek","orcid":"0000-0003-4196-6293","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":570926,"name":"Casey Kopczynski","orcid":"0000-0002-2173-8309","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":418176,"name":"Sina Farsiu","orcid":"0000-0003-4872-2902","position":12,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":571834,"name":"John R. Samples","orcid":null,"position":13,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":571835,"name":"Pratap Challa","orcid":null,"position":14,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":336418,"name":"C. Ross Ethier","orcid":"0000-0001-6110-3052","position":15,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":292183,"name":"W. Daniel Stamer","orcid":"0000-0002-2504-8997","position":16,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":570923,"name":"Guorong Li","orcid":"0000-0002-7206-9168","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":88,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:43:44.759273Z","pmid":"33783352","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}