Russian scientists were able to grow the retina from stem cells

Scientists at the Federal Scientific and Clinical Center for Physicochemical Medicine (FSC RCM) have learned to grow the retina from reprogrammed stem cells, the center’s general director, Vadim Govorun, told Izvestia.

In their development, Russian scientists relied on the discovery of Nobel laureate Shinye Yamanaka, who discovered that it is possible to reprogram human cells back to an embryonic state, and then grow almost any tissue from such cells.

As Sergei Kiselev, head of the laboratory of biomedical technologies, explained, such embryonic cells produce only an unrelated transplant, which the patient’s body usually rejects. However, in eye transplantation, tissue relatedness is not so important, the scientist emphasized, although he suggested that transplants from related cells would survive better.

Researchers have managed to grow the retina from stem cells. The use of reprogrammed cells, universal for a large number of recipients, makes it possible to simplify the technology and reduce the cost of retinal implantation in patients. The grown retinas have already been tested on rabbits, and now scientists are waiting for the Law on Biomedical Cell Products to come into force in order to conduct clinical trials of the implant.

The Federal Scientific Center for Physics and Chemistry believes that retinal replacement surgery would cure patients who are losing their vision due to macular degeneration - ischemia of the central zone of the retina, which is a common cause of blindness in people over 55 years of age. The first patients may be family members with

hereditary macular degeneration, for which there is no cure. Such patients can go blind as early as 20-30 years old, so genome-edited retinal cells were prepared for the children of this family.

Previously, the Federal Scientific Research Center developed a technology for creating artificial skin for patients suffering from burns. To make the drug, ordinary donor skin cells are returned to an embryonic state, after which specialists block individual genes to reduce the immunogenicity of artificial skin.