Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University have created a light-sensitive retina in a laboratory using human tissue.
Study leader M. Valeria Canto-Soler, Ph.D., said that the 3D complement of human retinal tissue, not only has the architectural organization of the retina but also has the ability to sense light, and the work advances opportunities for vision-saving research and may ultimately lead to technologies that restore vision in people with retinal diseases.
Canto-Soler cautions that photoreceptors are only part of the story in the complex eye-brain process of vision, and her lab hasn't yet recreated all of the functions of the human eye and its links to the visual cortex of the brain.
The achievement emerged from experiments with human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) and could, eventually, enable genetically engineered retinal cell transplants that halt or even reverse a patient's march toward blindness, the researchers say.
The iPS can develop into most or all of the 200 cell types in the human body, and the scientists at the University, turned them into retinal progenitor cells destined to form light-sensitive retinal tissue that lines the back of the eye.
Canto-Soler said that the newly developed system gives them the ability to generate hundreds of mini-retinas at a time directly from a person affected by a particular retinal disease such as retinitis pigmentosa. This provides a unique biological system to study the cause of retinal diseases directly in human tissue, instead of relying on animal models.
The system also opens an array of possibilities for personalized medicine such as testing drugs to treat these diseases in a patient-specific way. In the long term, the potential is also there to replace diseased or dead retinal tissue with lab-grown material to restore vision.
The study was reported in the journal Nature Communications.
