CELLS that might one day cure some kinds of blindness have been staring us in the face, according to Derek van der Kooy of the University of Toronto.
鈥淓veryone had assumed that the eye did not contain stem cells,鈥� van der Kooy told a stem cell meeting in Melbourne, Australia. But several years ago his team found retinal stem cells in the eyes of mice.
Now the researchers have isolated them in humans, from the black ring around the iris. When these cells are injected into the eyes of baby mice, they generate all the different retinal cell types, including the light-detecting rods and cones.
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The team used cells from eyes donated to the Eye Bank of Canada. Each eye provides about 10,000 cells, and each of these can yield 15,000 progenitor cells. 鈥淭he important next step is to show function,鈥� says Pritinder Kaur of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute in Melbourne. 鈥淭hey need to show that they can make a blind mouse see.鈥�
To do this, van der Kooy plans to inject the cells into the eyes of adult mice, including some that have genetic disorders that cause the photoreceptors to degenerate as they do in retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that causes progressive blindness in a humans.