Lab-Grown Retinal Cells Could Provide New Eye Therapies

Duke University biomedical engineers achieved a first in eye research. They used induced pluripotent stem cells to grow specialized blood vessel cells needed for a healthy retina.

The retina’s blood barrier controls what enters the eye, which makes it difficult to treat the eye. To make matters worse, the specific cells that make up this tissue don’t form anywhere else in the body.

“Retinal vascular diseases affect millions of people in the US, but our understanding remains limited, hindering our ability to discover and develop new therapeutics,” said Sharon Gerecht, the Chair of Biomedical Engineering at Duke. “Using human stem cells, we generated the cells found in retinal blood vessels, paving the way for new therapeutic approaches.”

Building Retinal Cells From Scratch

Eye cells are currently expensive and limited in supply because they are collected from human patients. To address this issue, researchers guided commercial stem cells with a specific cocktail of growth factors until they became the exact retinal cells they needed.

“When this specialized blood vessel tissue begins to break down, it can cause a lot of different diseases that lead to vision loss,” said Parker Esswein, a PhD student. “While there are sources of retinal endothelial cells, being able to grow a continuous supply from scratch could offer many advantages for those working in the field.”

Putting the Results to the Test

The team exposed their lab-grown tissues to low oxygen and high glucose, the same conditions that cause diabetic retinopathy. Just like in real human patients, the tissue barrier broke down.

Then, they injected the cells into mice with weak blood vessels. The cells integrated into the existing tissue and built a strong barrier, which could prevent vision loss before it starts.

“The tests showed that these lab-grown cells have promise for preventative treatments, especially since they should be easier and cheaper to obtain using our technique,” Esswein said. “And while our benchtop experiments did not attempt to model a wide variety of specific eye diseases in these studies, we’re confident we can create excellent human tissue models in the lab to help better understand these diseases and uncover therapies.”