Cell-stem vision
Stem cells help the diseased retina to see
One of the most common causes of blindness in the elderly is age–related macular degeneration of the retina. The macula is called the zone of the greatest visual acuity, it is thanks to the visual receptors of the macula that we can read, drive a car and generally do any job where we need to notice even the smallest details. And with age-related macular degeneration, the photoreceptors of the macula die, and they die because other auxiliary cells that should support and nourish the receptors fail there.
Researchers from University College London, together with colleagues from other research centers in the UK and the USA, managed to improve the eyesight of two elderly people with macular degeneration, an 86-year-old man and a woman over 60 years old. To do this, they took stem embryonic cells, which, as is known, can turn into absolutely any other type of cells, and programmed them to turn into those very auxiliary feeding cells of the retina. The resulting cellular "patches" were transplanted to patients whose eyesight improved significantly after that. An article in Nature Biotechnology (da Cruz et al., Phase 1 clinical study of an embryonic stem cell–derived retinal pigment epithelium patch in age-related macular degeneration) states that a year later they both began to distinguish between 29 and 21 letters more on ophthalmic tables than before; according to the man he was even able to read newspapers again. However, both volunteers continue to be monitored – it is important to understand how the transplanted cells will behave in the future for a longer time. If everything goes well, it will be possible to think about introducing such a method of treating age-related blindness into everyday medical practice.
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