“The fact is, once the nerves in the retina start to be damaged through disease, they don’t regrow,” says Professor Lyndon da Cruz. “So, people lose their central and high-quality vision. It would be powerful if we could put back what’s missing.”
That is exactly what they are trying to do at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology in London, the United Kingdom. Professor da Cruz and his colleague Professor Pete Coffey are conducting ground-breaking work in stem cell research to find a new treatment for age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
“AMD mostly affects the elderly population, taking away the enjoyment of their retirement,” says Professor da Cruz. “They can’t read; they can’t see faces; they can’t drive. In the past there was no real solution for this. We would just tell people that they have an illness which affects the nerves in their eyes and that their vision would eventually be lost permanently.”
Now, however, by building on the expertise of the London Project to Cure Blindness through stem cell therapies, Professors da Cruz and Coffey want to use stem cells to replace the neural tissues in the retina. If they are successful, this will have a significant impact on blindness worldwide.
This procedure will be streamlined to involve a simple operation taking less than one hour under local anaesthetic, during which a small “transplant patch” populated with stem cells is injected into the back of the eye. Ultimately, many thousands of these patches will be made up in a lab, ready and waiting for use by doctors. This will systematise a solution to an illness which, up till now, did not have a cure.
Moorfields Eye Hospital is the leading provider for eye health services in the UK and a world-class centre of excellence for ophthalmic research. The research partnership of Professors da Cruz and Coffey and their team provides an unrivalled opportunity to transform how people think about and treat eye diseases.
“What it’s done now is opened up a huge treatment opportunity for a large number of people that could never have been helped in the past,” says da Cruz. “That’s why we’re excited about looking at all the possibilities stem cells hold in replacing different types of nerves, hitherto irreparable.”
This grant falls under the Special Interest Programme. Special Interest grants cover a wide range of fields, including health, humanitarian relief, education and the arts. [ Ссылка ]
To learn more about Moorfield’s Eye Charity, visit its website: [ Ссылка ]
