Cellular therapy to reverse blindness

Maria Pia Cosma

Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG), Spain

The retina transforms the light received by the eye into a nerve impulse that travels to the brain, where it is converted into images. Degenerative diseases of the retina are a heterogeneous collection of pathologies that affect sight, and some can cause blindness. Billions of people around the world have some form of these pathologies.

The most common retinal degenerative disease is retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative minority pathology. In this case, the patient progressively loses photoreceptors, the cells that convert light into signals, until eventually becoming blind.

Cellular therapy is the solution to regenerate the neurons of the retina and recover vision. Experiments of new treatments in animals, such as mice, are difficult to later transfer to humans. The project proposes new experiments with organoids, a recreation of the retina from the stem cells of the patient, in order to test new therapies of regeneration of photoreceptors and to reverse blindness in these people.

• Núria Montserrat, Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), Spain

• Ralph Michael, Instituto Barraquer, Spain

Regenerating photoreceptors in human retinal organoids to establish a treatment for Retinitis Pigmentosa

€499,519