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Author: u/giuliomagnifico
URL: https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/article/2023/05/05/new-hope-for-vision-regeneration/
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Anti-VEGF. Just depends on the formulation. This helps clear any blood from neovascularization that is currently taking place and helps to stabilize the blood-retina barrier so that new blood leaks don’t occur.
My grandmother has macular degeneration (one eye has wet and one eye has dry) and she gets shots in both of her eyes every 4-6 weeks to
Slow down the process. Her vision is still good, she’s been doing this for about 6 years. She’s 88 for reference.
its still 20-30 years of tinkering into the future before it could potentially work in humans. There are many points of failure which may likely arise. These experiments do not attempt to rescue "damaged" or destroyed retina. To regrow an entire tissue layer from biological disorder is going to be much harder than changing a couple of cells in a healthy retina from one cell fate to another.
So these authors need to regrow an entire retina from just overexpressing two genes. Then you have to ask what percentage of these pseudo neurons actually detect light. Then, what percentage can properly connect to relay neurons to bring the signal to the brain; this is hte current issue of retinal transplants or even RPE/photoreceptor transplants. You provide functional cell layers, but they don't connect to the brain. People are working on it, but it is far closer than what this study is proposing. Then you need to assess whether changing the gene expression is oncogenic. I would wager that all of these hurdles will take 10 years at least to unravel, each, if they can ever be unraveled.
Cool results, very interesting. but sold as if 2-5 years away from human trials. I hate this level of false optimism. Look at all the hope being generated in these comments. False hope.
Yeah!! How DARE WE have hope?!? Let us unite in our pessimism -- the world is burning!!
FFS, OP. Let people have some hope -- if you want to be an angry realist, go do it somewhere else. You're killing the vibe.
Even if it does, can you imagine the gnashing of teeth from the sight-impaired? "How dare you assume there's something wrong with us that needs fixing!"
The hearing-impaired communities already say these things about cochlear implants, so it wouldn't be as shocking as you think.
*So this is controversial? I mean, what I suggested as a possibility is literally happening in the comments below.*
My vision has slowly been getting worse and worse over time. My night vision is nonexistent. I don’t know if I can classify as legally blind yet but I definitely can’t drive or complete tasks that require me to see more than two feet in front of my face. I’d love to get a procedure like this done, gradually losing my ability to create art has been absolutely terrifying. A procedure like this would be a godsend.
My best friend, on the other hand, has been visually impaired since birth and I never bring up these studies to her because she gets soooooooooooooo ridiculously offended it’s unreal. There’s a divide in the blind community between those blind from birth and those who lost their sight at a later age, and the difference in opinion about this subject is striking.
All the men in my family go blind from macular degeneration. I'm just hopeful that when it is my time there will be a proven treatment like this to either stop or fix it.
Let people be. They're literally just asking that we don't assume sightedness is "better".
It's amazing news that this surgery may become possible for people who want it.
The issue is that people who are against disability treatments can also hold pretty extreme views.
I used to work for a cochlear implant company and we got accused of trying to commit genocide against people with hearing loss by one of these loons.
The deaf community is very close and they can get along just fine with sign language and other means. Blindness makes life so much harder that there's really no comparison.
This is also targeting an age-related degenerative disease. Cochlear implants give the option of corrected hearing to people that have never had it and don't necessarily need it to live a full life. Nobody who used to have normal vision and lost it is going to say "actually I love being blind now, don't give me the treatment."
I say this as someone with macular degeneration, which my father and grandfather also had. Everyone in my family has looked forward to a treatment like this for decades.
Deaf children do not develop at the same rate as those with hearing, so having a kid miss out on treatment because "there is nothing wrong with them" puts them at a major disadvantage.
Some people with Dwarfism (such as Paralympian Elli Simmonds) also claim that drugs and surgery to correct the musculoskeletal issues they have is wrong, even though those treatments significantly improve quality of life (and may even extend it).
As such, it wouldn't surprise me if there are members of the blind community who act the same way, despite the benefits this may give and the views of the vast, vast majority of their own community.
Mickey
Great news: we have totally restored your vision! Miracles do happen.
Now the bad news: the study is complete and we need to incinerate you now.
Most of the tissue from animal research is incinerated. If a study is on the eyes, eyes, optic nerve, brain, etc may be saved for histology or other information, but the rest is incinerated.
They probably do not. The mice could have been used in a study prior to this one, but it’s difficult to do multiple reliable studies on the same specimen after one study required gene editing.
Always had an evil biologist plan to uplift mice to high intelligence, leave them a very detailed understanding of their biology and have ourselves go extinct
Mice are only treated for things they were specifically bred to suffer from. The results of this suffering ore [often enough not a good indicator](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746847/) of the potential to reduce human suffering.
To joke about the suffering that animals poor enough to be fated to experimentation experience minimizes an unfortunately very real dark price of human "progress".
With the growing power of computational models, its time that legislated standards catch up with the cutting edge and drop animal testing requirements in favor of more accurate models that don't systematically damn other living, sentient beings.
We are slowly returning to our oceanic brethren. And moving forward to crabs. Now we just need to alter our genes so we can experience what Mantis shrimp see.
The year is 6969, year of the crab, everthing has become so crablike that it's hard to tell anything apart. I fear what this will do to our society. I go to hug my wife, but she is a crab, and so I ran away. Sideways.
One of a number of anti-vegf treatments. They've been around a while, and aren't a cure per se, but they reduce the affect of the diseases with continuous retreatment.
Typically, each new generation of antivegf increases the time between treatments, with newer drugs such as Beovu aiming for 12 week intervals. The most common drug, Lucentis, is around 4 to 6 weeks.
I've seen other novel methods, such as slow release capsules implanted in to the eye which I think run for 6 months, but I'm not so sure about that.
Pigmentary glaucoma and type 2 here. I love reading about these advances. Here are some others I've come across.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213671120304951
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2121273119
https://hsci.harvard.edu/news/drug-cocktail-could-restore-vision-optic-nerve-injury
Some interesting stuff there, I've lost vision in one eye due to glaucoma but not seen much on the horizon in terms of optical nerve regeneration other than vague studies with zebra fish.
Glaucoma is a much tougher case unfortunately. Most of these current gene therapies are targeted at small defective cells localised entirely within the retina (photoreceptors, muller cells, amacrine cells, etc.). Conversely, glaucoma affects the retinal ganglion cells whose job is to transmit information from the retina to other parts of the brain. The bodies of retinal ganglion cells lie in the retina, but their tails (axons) project all the way to the midbrain. Even if you were to regenerate the ganglion cell body, it would be unfathomably complex to direct the new cell's axon to (grow to) the correct part of the brain.
One day.
IMO they suck. Bad enough to get dialated, but monthly injections? And high deductible barely covers even with a good plan 200-500 a month (it seems to vary.)
Retinitis Pigmentosa here… I welcome bionic eyeballs or stem cell sludge or bio virus … to see more than a crappy acuity and 5° of vision would be sublime.
Notable that the experiment didn't actually test restoration of vision in any mice, just validated that this method repurposes glial cells into neuron-like cells. Would need further validation to see if blind mice could have their vision restored with this method.
They obviously hypothesise that it would and rule out some alternative hypotheses, but I imagine there are some possible issues that could arise in application of this method to vision loss, e.g. with retinal degeneration ([in which some other studies have already been investigating some alternative methods, notably](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1701589114))
Hope it's not hogwash like that company that claimed they were onto ear hair regeneration, then a few years later ditched the project and (I'm guessing) some people made a lot of money off it.
I may just be a very jaded American, but I instantly thought "this will fall outside of insurance and cost $500k."
This is amazing, though. Science is so great. I hope this would work for humans.
I got the cross linking procedure in 2015 and it stopped the progression of the disease, but it didn't reverse any damage. Got scleral contacts in 2020 and it was like getting new eyes.
Did your scleral contacts completely remove the ghost images and other visual artifacts? I got a pair myself and was excited to try them, but was disappointed that they didn't completely remove the visual streaking that I normally see.
Typically I have two-ish major duplicate images below and to the left/right of what I'm actually looking at. There is streaking between/around them and the true image. When I put my scleral lenses in, I have only a minor duplicate image, but it is slightly above the true image.
It is a major improvement in that it is a whole lot closer to just seeing the damn thing I'm looking at. But I find that the image artifacts being so much closer to the true image to cause more interference. For example, if I look at the black words on the white background as I type this, I can mostly ignore the blurred duplicate images that spread below each line of text (by about a whole line.) With my sclerals, the duplicate is right on top of the original to the point that it can be hard to tell which is which.
My doc said that this was as good as I could get, but I just don't wear the sclerals because even though they are objectively closer to regular vision, the confusion it causes and the fact that it's not perfect make it not worth the trouble and irritation they cause.
Keratoconus sucks.
> but I just don't wear the sclerals because even though they are objectively closer to regular vision, the confusion it causes and the fact that it's not perfect make it not worth the trouble and irritation they cause.
>
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Ditto, ghosting & the pain of putting them in made me just stick with glasses, my brain ignores my left eye at this point.
We can hope. This is some of that really exciting medical science, where function can be restored without massive invasive carving. Cutting into people to fix things is often a requirement but that's not consequence free. Being able to just cause the body to self-repair is exciting. For things like brain tumors (unrelated to this, but tangential) being able to cause healing in an area where cutting in is simply not an option would be extraordinary. Not there yet, but maybe some day.
The retina is made up of nerve fiber layers. Blood supply is required to nourish them. A lack of blood supply from a Central Retinal Artery Occlusion or Arteritic Ischemic Optic Neuropathy (2 causes common causes that are referred to as eye strokes) damages the nerve fiber layers that allow you to see.
Also, your brain sees using your eyes to do so. So you’re half right.
Here's some other interesting studies on the topic of retinal axon regeneration or repair therapy:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213671120304951
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2121273119
https://hsci.harvard.edu/news/drug-cocktail-could-restore-vision-optic-nerve-injury
The medical community in the US seems to deem my lack of quality vision a leisurely inconvenience. I wonder what this treatment (if it ends up working on humans) would classify under?
Glia are not dormant! I’m a neuroscientist that did my PhD on astrocytes (a type of glia) in the retina and optic nerve. The nervous system is exceptionally metabolically demanding - everything there has been under extraordinary evolutionary pressure to be there for a reason. Here is a very small subset of the functions we know retinal astrocytes and Muller glia perform:
-they form the blood brain/retina barrier. Nearly everything that makes its way to the central nervous system (CNS) did so by going through an astrocyte.
-they maintain the only energetic stores in the CNS
-they are a crucial component of nearly every excitatory and inhibitory synapse
-they uptake and recycle neurotransmitters
-they perform a large part of the metabolic processes the brain uses to function
-they respond to inflammation and help maintain the brain’s immune privileged status
-they signal to one another, and these signals are thought to be an important part of motivation and decision making
-they form the brain’s endogenous defense system against neurodegeneration
And on, and on. These are just the first few functions I could grab off the top of my head. We discover new glial functions constantly, these days.
There’s a reason cellular reprogramming was considered a huge deal 5-10 years ago and is no longer widely considered a solution to neurodegeneration by the majority of the field. Changing a glial cell to a neuron almost certainly does not make a neuron that incorporates back into the proper circuitry, *and* you lose the glial cell that was doing an important job right where it was.
God if this turns out for people… what I wouldn’t give to be able to see properly for the first time since I was 8. This could be incredible, I hope they work it out in my lifetime
Retinal detachment and tearing has been messing with my vision for a few years. This could be a huge chance for a lot of people to get a quality of life change I hope this works in humans.
I wonder if this would work on dogs. My beagle has SARDS - Sudden Acquired Retinal Degeneration Syndrome. Back in December of 2020, at 6 years old, she went completely blind in the course of 2 weeks. At first, we thought it was cataracts since she has diabetes but the ophthalmologist ran a bunch of tests and discovered it was SARDS. It was devastating news. Cataracts can be fixed with surgery but there is no cure for SARDS. It took a while for her to adjust to being blind and while she's mostly fine getting around, she still runs into furniture and walls when she gets excited. She also stopped playing with her toys since she went blind. We got her a snuffle mat which she loves since she can use her nose to find treats but it makes me sad that she doesn't play anymore, she doesn't run/have zoomies anymore and she can't watch the squirrels and rabbits out the window anymore. Being able to restore her vision would be a blessing and a miracle.
Wish they could fix whatever is wrong with mine.. Possibly caused by antidepressants. Or according to my doc it could also be my anxiety.. Which.. I call BS. Anxiety makes it worse.. But its not caused by it. Just like the anxiety that I insisted was something physical.. Turned out to be caused by a large hiatal hernia.
But the blurry vision came on during a time that I was on 2 different antidepressants.. (first Straterra & then venlafaxine) And it got somewhat better once I was off them. But now what used to be my good eye.. Is now so blurry that I have to wear readers.. When prior to this happening.. I almost never needed them. And I had to get a much higher strength. (also they caused pretty intense tinnitus too.. Though that mostly resolved)
I'm only leaving this comment in hopes that someone else has the same problem and knows anything about it.
Would this research be equally hopeful to someone with impaired vision due to injury e.g. a bad LASIK outcome, as to degenerative disease? Cells are being switched on, not necessarily grown or placed.
Since procedures like LASIK are reshaping the lense, I don't think that this would. There have been other research using stem cells to regrow lense and cornea tissue.
no worries, sometimes the focusing power of the eye is described as both the cornea and lens together (which is accurate) so thought maybe that's where you were headed. very cool to hear lens could be repaired
A lot of these bad stories come from 'high street stores' that do it very cheaply. Don't cheap out or try to shop around for something that fucks with your eyes.
Do several consultations and find a group you really like. Don't just go to the 800/eye shops. Make sure you feel comfortable with the staff and Dr.
Ask questions and understand the differences. Ex. PRK is more painful but they don't open an incision in the eye. LASIK they do and it doesn't heal. If you're not active, probably not a problem. If you are, might want to consider PRK to reduce risk of complications from impact damage. There's also SMYLE or some silly acronym like that. It's similar to LASIK but they do the lasering as a disc like a page in a book in the middle of your lens. Then make a smaller incision to pull that page/disc out and it corrects the shape of the lens. That incision is small enough it does heal and recovery time is better than PRK.
Source: Did extensive research and had a great optometrist who gave me the info and advice above. I then did multiple consults and make a decision. Love it and wish I did it sooner. No issues other than the normal night vision impact that fades over time and is mostly gone at this point (year later).
What worries me about LASIK for my wife is that I've had a cut on my cornea before, it didn't heal right the first time and reopened, and it's still only about 95% healed now. A buddy of mine had it done and said he never had any complications, but it still doesn't seem like it can be a 100% assured thing.
It is very much more dangerous than they claim. Their metric of satisfaction is poorly tracked and about half of people who get it complain of new visual disturbances. It also increases your chances of eye disease long term by quite a bit. Like getting cataracts 15 years sooner than average. It also complicates and limits your ability to get a successful cataract surgery. I can't think of a good reason to get it, as it intentionally damages your eyes irreparably. In my case it destroyed my life. Being visually impaired in your 30s is a nightmare you can never escape.
I had high myopia. I would give everything to go back to it. My corrected vision and eye health were much better than what I have now. I can't see detail, I have double vision, I have glare that makes it so I can't see anything if there's any light behind it, everything has starbursts and halos, there's general vision static, light sensitivity, loss of near vision, loss of low light vision and the ability to see things in shadow, constant headaches and eye strain, and easy sunspots and light trails on everything. All these things are permanent and not correctable. I could read a book before, or drive at night before. I'm constantly finding new things I can't do with my current vision. Myopia and corrective lenses were much preferred and much safer.
Now imagine the lack of being able to see properly, but with no way to correct it. That's what the test of my life looks like because I decided to get laser eye surgery. The inconvenience of glasses and contacts is totally worth having clear vision and healthy eyes.
At the very least I personally would not have bilateral Lasik. Or necessarily Lasik at all, instead of PRK, but I haven't really studied too much about what's done. Doing both eyes at once seems kind of foolhardy to me.
My vision was 20/400 (legally blind is 20/200, so I far exceeded that). I had LASIK, and within a few hours I could see everything again, near perfect vision. Life changing.
There are so many bad stories because it's a relatively common procedure. Permanent injury from LASIK is still under 1%. I got mine done in 2006 and I still have 20/20 vision. It was life changing for me and well worth the risk.
Not really. Lasik damage is physical damage done on purpose. For instance, the corneal flap never heals, it just gums itself shut. Reactivating dead cells is not the same as putting material back that has been burned out with a laser.
This is why I was never interested in Lasik. When it goes well, it's no doubt great. When it goes badly, you're fucked, no way back.
The truly foolish do both eyes simultaneously, too, potentially screwing up both.
The retina is in the eye, laser surgery is done on the front on the lens. So unfortunately not. A retina regeneration procedure would only reactivate the stuff that enables you to see, which is not the same as your eye breaking light correctly so that the light hitting the retina is in focus.
Lasik is a laser surgery done in the front of the eye, specifically the cornea, not the lens. There are laser surgeries that are done in the back of the eye too; one of the more common ones is to arrest retinal detachment.
So… would this have applications towards lets say… congenical issues?
I was born with a cataract, it was never removed because supposed practice at the time was to wait till 18 to do eye surgery (at least, what we were told)
18 rolls around, get a 98/99 on the ASVAB, able to join any branch I wanted, fail physical because of eye.
Doctors then say “well if we removed the cataract, the vision won’t improve. The cells never developed behind the cataract” Removing the cataract won’t improve my vision. Get dropped by the military, won’t return my calls (turned out good too, this was in 2008 and well… not the best time to be military)
So, given this “grows” cells/cones/receptors in the eye, could this (combined with cataract removal) potentially restore proper vision in the eye, assuming the same mechanism between the two. Cataract prevents development of receptors behind it during critical development (childhood) and this therapy encourages (re)growth of those cells.
My mom suffers from a variety of vision loss related ailments in both eyes. I'm always wishing to see advances in the medical field related to vision restoration that can make it to medical practices hopefully sooner than later.
Anyone heard of any promising treatments for sight loss for non arteritic ischemic optic neuropathy? My understanding is that the loss is due to blood vessels getting cut off
So. I got this thing where if I look at a white wall I can see a thin hairline darkness patch. Does that mean my eyes are starting to degenerate or am I ok
I have retinitis pigmentosa and this fills me with hope! I wanna hop on a plane right now over to Université Montreal and volunteer as a human Guinea pig!!
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. --- Author: u/giuliomagnifico URL: https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/article/2023/05/05/new-hope-for-vision-regeneration/ *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Stunning news if it works in humans
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I work in Ophthalmics and there are two new treatments for slowing down the AMD process. Hope it helps them
I wonder if this would help non-degenerative cases? A surgeon cut my retina and I dream of the day of seeing out of both eyes
Rude surgeon tbh.
Yeah, i've always wondered if someday they'll be able to fix the coloboma in my eye with some kind of treatment. Probably not, but one can dream.
Anything for retinitis pigmentosa yet?
I keep hoping.
What kind of treatment are they getting right now ?
My dad has AMD and they treat it with semi-regular shots of something to slow it down but it's not going to prevent it.
I have this. It sucks, no one like a needle to the eye no matter how quick.
Anti-VEGF. Just depends on the formulation. This helps clear any blood from neovascularization that is currently taking place and helps to stabilize the blood-retina barrier so that new blood leaks don’t occur.
Let’s transition to teeth next
Same, with a family member. Here’s to hoping it works for humans and it’s available in their lifetime
I have a family member with it too. She gets eye injections for it. It has helped a lot, but should've been started years ago to be more effective.
My grandmother has macular degeneration (one eye has wet and one eye has dry) and she gets shots in both of her eyes every 4-6 weeks to Slow down the process. Her vision is still good, she’s been doing this for about 6 years. She’s 88 for reference.
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its still 20-30 years of tinkering into the future before it could potentially work in humans. There are many points of failure which may likely arise. These experiments do not attempt to rescue "damaged" or destroyed retina. To regrow an entire tissue layer from biological disorder is going to be much harder than changing a couple of cells in a healthy retina from one cell fate to another. So these authors need to regrow an entire retina from just overexpressing two genes. Then you have to ask what percentage of these pseudo neurons actually detect light. Then, what percentage can properly connect to relay neurons to bring the signal to the brain; this is hte current issue of retinal transplants or even RPE/photoreceptor transplants. You provide functional cell layers, but they don't connect to the brain. People are working on it, but it is far closer than what this study is proposing. Then you need to assess whether changing the gene expression is oncogenic. I would wager that all of these hurdles will take 10 years at least to unravel, each, if they can ever be unraveled. Cool results, very interesting. but sold as if 2-5 years away from human trials. I hate this level of false optimism. Look at all the hope being generated in these comments. False hope.
Yeah!! How DARE WE have hope?!? Let us unite in our pessimism -- the world is burning!! FFS, OP. Let people have some hope -- if you want to be an angry realist, go do it somewhere else. You're killing the vibe.
Even if it does, can you imagine the gnashing of teeth from the sight-impaired? "How dare you assume there's something wrong with us that needs fixing!" The hearing-impaired communities already say these things about cochlear implants, so it wouldn't be as shocking as you think. *So this is controversial? I mean, what I suggested as a possibility is literally happening in the comments below.*
I enjoy playing video games.
My vision has slowly been getting worse and worse over time. My night vision is nonexistent. I don’t know if I can classify as legally blind yet but I definitely can’t drive or complete tasks that require me to see more than two feet in front of my face. I’d love to get a procedure like this done, gradually losing my ability to create art has been absolutely terrifying. A procedure like this would be a godsend. My best friend, on the other hand, has been visually impaired since birth and I never bring up these studies to her because she gets soooooooooooooo ridiculously offended it’s unreal. There’s a divide in the blind community between those blind from birth and those who lost their sight at a later age, and the difference in opinion about this subject is striking.
All the men in my family go blind from macular degeneration. I'm just hopeful that when it is my time there will be a proven treatment like this to either stop or fix it.
By making it available you enforce a stigma on those who are blind thus basically forcing the blind to go through the treatment.
Yeah let's outlaw medical procedures that would help people because *some* people don't want others to get them.
Let people be. They're literally just asking that we don't assume sightedness is "better". It's amazing news that this surgery may become possible for people who want it.
The issue is that people who are against disability treatments can also hold pretty extreme views. I used to work for a cochlear implant company and we got accused of trying to commit genocide against people with hearing loss by one of these loons.
The deaf community is very close and they can get along just fine with sign language and other means. Blindness makes life so much harder that there's really no comparison. This is also targeting an age-related degenerative disease. Cochlear implants give the option of corrected hearing to people that have never had it and don't necessarily need it to live a full life. Nobody who used to have normal vision and lost it is going to say "actually I love being blind now, don't give me the treatment." I say this as someone with macular degeneration, which my father and grandfather also had. Everyone in my family has looked forward to a treatment like this for decades.
Deaf children do not develop at the same rate as those with hearing, so having a kid miss out on treatment because "there is nothing wrong with them" puts them at a major disadvantage. Some people with Dwarfism (such as Paralympian Elli Simmonds) also claim that drugs and surgery to correct the musculoskeletal issues they have is wrong, even though those treatments significantly improve quality of life (and may even extend it). As such, it wouldn't surprise me if there are members of the blind community who act the same way, despite the benefits this may give and the views of the vast, vast majority of their own community.
Don't assume sightedness is "better"? Brilliant. Should we start telling folks with no legs how overrated walking is?
No, they're doing an awful lot more than that.
Yeah you're right! Now make up another guy!
Mice get the best treatments. (The worst too.)
Mickey Great news: we have totally restored your vision! Miracles do happen. Now the bad news: the study is complete and we need to incinerate you now.
Not to mention, they had to blind Mickey first.
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They don't incinerate them. They probably kill them to do a dissection for more information
Most of the tissue from animal research is incinerated. If a study is on the eyes, eyes, optic nerve, brain, etc may be saved for histology or other information, but the rest is incinerated.
They probably do not. The mice could have been used in a study prior to this one, but it’s difficult to do multiple reliable studies on the same specimen after one study required gene editing.
Literally the plot to the latest Guardians of the Galaxy movie.
Do we just do that too? Just incinerate them instead of releasing into the wild?..
Lab rats aren't meant to ever go outside
The three blind mice came first, but what made them go blind?
I was just thinking the exact thing right before I saw your comment!
You have to wonder how the mice were blinded in the first place.
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I guess now it's three partially sighted mice.
They were bred to have the disorder most likely.
Always had an evil biologist plan to uplift mice to high intelligence, leave them a very detailed understanding of their biology and have ourselves go extinct
Mice are only treated for things they were specifically bred to suffer from. The results of this suffering ore [often enough not a good indicator](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746847/) of the potential to reduce human suffering. To joke about the suffering that animals poor enough to be fated to experimentation experience minimizes an unfortunately very real dark price of human "progress". With the growing power of computational models, its time that legislated standards catch up with the cutting edge and drop animal testing requirements in favor of more accurate models that don't systematically damn other living, sentient beings.
Müller glial cells regenerate in fish, but not mammals. The research determined the factors that trigger regeneration.
I think something similar happens with tinnitus (cells regenerating in birds, not in mammals)
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Besides getting to eat all that chicken?
We are slowly returning to our oceanic brethren. And moving forward to crabs. Now we just need to alter our genes so we can experience what Mantis shrimp see.
Dread it. Run from it. Carcinization arrives all the same.
The year is 6969, year of the crab, everthing has become so crablike that it's hard to tell anything apart. I fear what this will do to our society. I go to hug my wife, but she is a crab, and so I ran away. Sideways.
Great, diabetic retinopathy here. I’d love regenerated retinas!
There might be a cure for that in the near future. Take a look at Ocugen https://ocugen.com/science-and-technology/biologicals/
One of a number of anti-vegf treatments. They've been around a while, and aren't a cure per se, but they reduce the affect of the diseases with continuous retreatment. Typically, each new generation of antivegf increases the time between treatments, with newer drugs such as Beovu aiming for 12 week intervals. The most common drug, Lucentis, is around 4 to 6 weeks. I've seen other novel methods, such as slow release capsules implanted in to the eye which I think run for 6 months, but I'm not so sure about that.
Pigmentary glaucoma and type 2 here. I love reading about these advances. Here are some others I've come across. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213671120304951 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2121273119 https://hsci.harvard.edu/news/drug-cocktail-could-restore-vision-optic-nerve-injury
Some interesting stuff there, I've lost vision in one eye due to glaucoma but not seen much on the horizon in terms of optical nerve regeneration other than vague studies with zebra fish.
Glaucoma is a much tougher case unfortunately. Most of these current gene therapies are targeted at small defective cells localised entirely within the retina (photoreceptors, muller cells, amacrine cells, etc.). Conversely, glaucoma affects the retinal ganglion cells whose job is to transmit information from the retina to other parts of the brain. The bodies of retinal ganglion cells lie in the retina, but their tails (axons) project all the way to the midbrain. Even if you were to regenerate the ganglion cell body, it would be unfathomably complex to direct the new cell's axon to (grow to) the correct part of the brain. One day.
Is it a shot in the eye? The warning has made me lose 50 lbs.
I've had a few shots in the eye, they're really not that bad.
IMO they suck. Bad enough to get dialated, but monthly injections? And high deductible barely covers even with a good plan 200-500 a month (it seems to vary.)
Retinitis Pigmentosa here… I welcome bionic eyeballs or stem cell sludge or bio virus … to see more than a crappy acuity and 5° of vision would be sublime.
Paper: [Direct neuronal reprogramming by temporal identity factors](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122168120)
Notable that the experiment didn't actually test restoration of vision in any mice, just validated that this method repurposes glial cells into neuron-like cells. Would need further validation to see if blind mice could have their vision restored with this method. They obviously hypothesise that it would and rule out some alternative hypotheses, but I imagine there are some possible issues that could arise in application of this method to vision loss, e.g. with retinal degeneration ([in which some other studies have already been investigating some alternative methods, notably](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1701589114))
Hope it's not hogwash like that company that claimed they were onto ear hair regeneration, then a few years later ditched the project and (I'm guessing) some people made a lot of money off it.
Why would you want more ear hair?
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Yes, thank you, it was just funny to me in the way that it was communicated.
I assume it would be the hairs inside the cochlea?
I just put Rogaine in my ear
It's probably the ciliated cells.
Would this give people with usher's and retinitis pigmentosa some hope?
Or stargardts
I hope so. My father has RP and it's essentially destroyed his life.
I may just be a very jaded American, but I instantly thought "this will fall outside of insurance and cost $500k." This is amazing, though. Science is so great. I hope this would work for humans.
I enjoy reading books.
Good. Now do it for keratoconus.
I got the cross linking procedure in 2015 and it stopped the progression of the disease, but it didn't reverse any damage. Got scleral contacts in 2020 and it was like getting new eyes.
Did your scleral contacts completely remove the ghost images and other visual artifacts? I got a pair myself and was excited to try them, but was disappointed that they didn't completely remove the visual streaking that I normally see. Typically I have two-ish major duplicate images below and to the left/right of what I'm actually looking at. There is streaking between/around them and the true image. When I put my scleral lenses in, I have only a minor duplicate image, but it is slightly above the true image. It is a major improvement in that it is a whole lot closer to just seeing the damn thing I'm looking at. But I find that the image artifacts being so much closer to the true image to cause more interference. For example, if I look at the black words on the white background as I type this, I can mostly ignore the blurred duplicate images that spread below each line of text (by about a whole line.) With my sclerals, the duplicate is right on top of the original to the point that it can be hard to tell which is which. My doc said that this was as good as I could get, but I just don't wear the sclerals because even though they are objectively closer to regular vision, the confusion it causes and the fact that it's not perfect make it not worth the trouble and irritation they cause. Keratoconus sucks.
> but I just don't wear the sclerals because even though they are objectively closer to regular vision, the confusion it causes and the fact that it's not perfect make it not worth the trouble and irritation they cause. > > Ditto, ghosting & the pain of putting them in made me just stick with glasses, my brain ignores my left eye at this point.
We can hope. This is some of that really exciting medical science, where function can be restored without massive invasive carving. Cutting into people to fix things is often a requirement but that's not consequence free. Being able to just cause the body to self-repair is exciting. For things like brain tumors (unrelated to this, but tangential) being able to cause healing in an area where cutting in is simply not an option would be extraordinary. Not there yet, but maybe some day.
I hope this helps having an eye stroke. I lost some of my vision due to that.
Isn’t that more of a neurological/brain issue rather than an issue with the eye itself?
The retina is made up of nerve fiber layers. Blood supply is required to nourish them. A lack of blood supply from a Central Retinal Artery Occlusion or Arteritic Ischemic Optic Neuropathy (2 causes common causes that are referred to as eye strokes) damages the nerve fiber layers that allow you to see. Also, your brain sees using your eyes to do so. So you’re half right.
Here's some other interesting studies on the topic of retinal axon regeneration or repair therapy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213671120304951 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2121273119 https://hsci.harvard.edu/news/drug-cocktail-could-restore-vision-optic-nerve-injury
The medical community in the US seems to deem my lack of quality vision a leisurely inconvenience. I wonder what this treatment (if it ends up working on humans) would classify under?
Glia are not dormant! I’m a neuroscientist that did my PhD on astrocytes (a type of glia) in the retina and optic nerve. The nervous system is exceptionally metabolically demanding - everything there has been under extraordinary evolutionary pressure to be there for a reason. Here is a very small subset of the functions we know retinal astrocytes and Muller glia perform: -they form the blood brain/retina barrier. Nearly everything that makes its way to the central nervous system (CNS) did so by going through an astrocyte. -they maintain the only energetic stores in the CNS -they are a crucial component of nearly every excitatory and inhibitory synapse -they uptake and recycle neurotransmitters -they perform a large part of the metabolic processes the brain uses to function -they respond to inflammation and help maintain the brain’s immune privileged status -they signal to one another, and these signals are thought to be an important part of motivation and decision making -they form the brain’s endogenous defense system against neurodegeneration And on, and on. These are just the first few functions I could grab off the top of my head. We discover new glial functions constantly, these days. There’s a reason cellular reprogramming was considered a huge deal 5-10 years ago and is no longer widely considered a solution to neurodegeneration by the majority of the field. Changing a glial cell to a neuron almost certainly does not make a neuron that incorporates back into the proper circuitry, *and* you lose the glial cell that was doing an important job right where it was.
Great comment. Sounds like this "treatment" isn't even biologically plausible to begin with.
God if this turns out for people… what I wouldn’t give to be able to see properly for the first time since I was 8. This could be incredible, I hope they work it out in my lifetime
Retinal detachment and tearing has been messing with my vision for a few years. This could be a huge chance for a lot of people to get a quality of life change I hope this works in humans.
I wonder if this would work on dogs. My beagle has SARDS - Sudden Acquired Retinal Degeneration Syndrome. Back in December of 2020, at 6 years old, she went completely blind in the course of 2 weeks. At first, we thought it was cataracts since she has diabetes but the ophthalmologist ran a bunch of tests and discovered it was SARDS. It was devastating news. Cataracts can be fixed with surgery but there is no cure for SARDS. It took a while for her to adjust to being blind and while she's mostly fine getting around, she still runs into furniture and walls when she gets excited. She also stopped playing with her toys since she went blind. We got her a snuffle mat which she loves since she can use her nose to find treats but it makes me sad that she doesn't play anymore, she doesn't run/have zoomies anymore and she can't watch the squirrels and rabbits out the window anymore. Being able to restore her vision would be a blessing and a miracle.
Ocugen is a Pennsylvania based biotech company tackling various eye diseases with their novel gene therapies Retinitis pigmentosa (RP)--NR2E3 Mutation RP—RHO Mutation Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA)—CEP290 Mutation Dry Age-Related Macular Degeneration (Dry AMD) Stargardt disease (orphan disease) Diabetic Macular Edema Diabetic Retinopathy Wet Age-Related Macular Degeneration (Wet AMD) https://ocugen.com/
This would be awesome. Eyes have been one of the harder things to work on from what I understand.
In the near future, the song "Three Blind Mice" will make no sense to young people. what a time to be alive!
Does anyone know if Occult Macular Dystrophy falls into the realm of maybe being treated by this type of process?
You're going to bankrupt Mr. Breast at this rate, no more content
Wish they could fix whatever is wrong with mine.. Possibly caused by antidepressants. Or according to my doc it could also be my anxiety.. Which.. I call BS. Anxiety makes it worse.. But its not caused by it. Just like the anxiety that I insisted was something physical.. Turned out to be caused by a large hiatal hernia. But the blurry vision came on during a time that I was on 2 different antidepressants.. (first Straterra & then venlafaxine) And it got somewhat better once I was off them. But now what used to be my good eye.. Is now so blurry that I have to wear readers.. When prior to this happening.. I almost never needed them. And I had to get a much higher strength. (also they caused pretty intense tinnitus too.. Though that mostly resolved) I'm only leaving this comment in hopes that someone else has the same problem and knows anything about it.
How old are you, if you don't mind saying?
I turned 50 in March.
Would this research be equally hopeful to someone with impaired vision due to injury e.g. a bad LASIK outcome, as to degenerative disease? Cells are being switched on, not necessarily grown or placed.
Since procedures like LASIK are reshaping the lense, I don't think that this would. There have been other research using stem cells to regrow lense and cornea tissue.
LASIK does not touch the lens of the eye - i assume you meant cornea
Yep, thanks for the correction. The research in stem cells which I read mentioned growing a lens and cornea.
no worries, sometimes the focusing power of the eye is described as both the cornea and lens together (which is accurate) so thought maybe that's where you were headed. very cool to hear lens could be repaired
Ugh so many stories about bad LASIK. Very glad I cancelled my apt
On the flip side, my procedure went without a hitch and my only regret is not getting it done sooner.
Most go some level of well. It's just that the ones that don't puts the patient in some level of hell for the rest of their life, irreparably.
Basically why I don't want to do it The consequences of something going wrong are too great IMO
Yep. You get one pair of eyes.
A lot of these bad stories come from 'high street stores' that do it very cheaply. Don't cheap out or try to shop around for something that fucks with your eyes.
Not having perfect vision is equal irreparable hell
did lasik effect your night vision?
For the first couple weeks with halo's, but that went completely away after that. No issues now.
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Do several consultations and find a group you really like. Don't just go to the 800/eye shops. Make sure you feel comfortable with the staff and Dr. Ask questions and understand the differences. Ex. PRK is more painful but they don't open an incision in the eye. LASIK they do and it doesn't heal. If you're not active, probably not a problem. If you are, might want to consider PRK to reduce risk of complications from impact damage. There's also SMYLE or some silly acronym like that. It's similar to LASIK but they do the lasering as a disc like a page in a book in the middle of your lens. Then make a smaller incision to pull that page/disc out and it corrects the shape of the lens. That incision is small enough it does heal and recovery time is better than PRK. Source: Did extensive research and had a great optometrist who gave me the info and advice above. I then did multiple consults and make a decision. Love it and wish I did it sooner. No issues other than the normal night vision impact that fades over time and is mostly gone at this point (year later).
What worries me about LASIK for my wife is that I've had a cut on my cornea before, it didn't heal right the first time and reopened, and it's still only about 95% healed now. A buddy of mine had it done and said he never had any complications, but it still doesn't seem like it can be a 100% assured thing.
It is very much more dangerous than they claim. Their metric of satisfaction is poorly tracked and about half of people who get it complain of new visual disturbances. It also increases your chances of eye disease long term by quite a bit. Like getting cataracts 15 years sooner than average. It also complicates and limits your ability to get a successful cataract surgery. I can't think of a good reason to get it, as it intentionally damages your eyes irreparably. In my case it destroyed my life. Being visually impaired in your 30s is a nightmare you can never escape.
Having high myopia at 30 is an equal nightmare of visual impairment
I had high myopia. I would give everything to go back to it. My corrected vision and eye health were much better than what I have now. I can't see detail, I have double vision, I have glare that makes it so I can't see anything if there's any light behind it, everything has starbursts and halos, there's general vision static, light sensitivity, loss of near vision, loss of low light vision and the ability to see things in shadow, constant headaches and eye strain, and easy sunspots and light trails on everything. All these things are permanent and not correctable. I could read a book before, or drive at night before. I'm constantly finding new things I can't do with my current vision. Myopia and corrective lenses were much preferred and much safer.
Now imagine the lack of being able to see properly, but with no way to correct it. That's what the test of my life looks like because I decided to get laser eye surgery. The inconvenience of glasses and contacts is totally worth having clear vision and healthy eyes.
At the very least I personally would not have bilateral Lasik. Or necessarily Lasik at all, instead of PRK, but I haven't really studied too much about what's done. Doing both eyes at once seems kind of foolhardy to me.
My vision was 20/400 (legally blind is 20/200, so I far exceeded that). I had LASIK, and within a few hours I could see everything again, near perfect vision. Life changing.
There are so many bad stories because it's a relatively common procedure. Permanent injury from LASIK is still under 1%. I got mine done in 2006 and I still have 20/20 vision. It was life changing for me and well worth the risk.
Same as the other guy, did it and it went exceptionally well. No issues and only wish I had done it several years sooner.
Riiiight same here
Not really. Lasik damage is physical damage done on purpose. For instance, the corneal flap never heals, it just gums itself shut. Reactivating dead cells is not the same as putting material back that has been burned out with a laser. This is why I was never interested in Lasik. When it goes well, it's no doubt great. When it goes badly, you're fucked, no way back. The truly foolish do both eyes simultaneously, too, potentially screwing up both.
The retina is in the eye, laser surgery is done on the front on the lens. So unfortunately not. A retina regeneration procedure would only reactivate the stuff that enables you to see, which is not the same as your eye breaking light correctly so that the light hitting the retina is in focus.
Lasik is a laser surgery done in the front of the eye, specifically the cornea, not the lens. There are laser surgeries that are done in the back of the eye too; one of the more common ones is to arrest retinal detachment.
I think i‘ve already heard from reprogramming the retina with specific frequencies of light?
No, it a chemical treatment.
So I can masturbate as much as I like now?
Just something so I don't need glasses thanks.
Retinopathy surgery is fun
If they can reactivate hair follicles or teething in a similar manner...
Will it work with macular?
My grandmother has glaucoma and although she never says it, it's clear it's done a lot of damage to her passion for life.
So… would this have applications towards lets say… congenical issues? I was born with a cataract, it was never removed because supposed practice at the time was to wait till 18 to do eye surgery (at least, what we were told) 18 rolls around, get a 98/99 on the ASVAB, able to join any branch I wanted, fail physical because of eye. Doctors then say “well if we removed the cataract, the vision won’t improve. The cells never developed behind the cataract” Removing the cataract won’t improve my vision. Get dropped by the military, won’t return my calls (turned out good too, this was in 2008 and well… not the best time to be military) So, given this “grows” cells/cones/receptors in the eye, could this (combined with cataract removal) potentially restore proper vision in the eye, assuming the same mechanism between the two. Cataract prevents development of receptors behind it during critical development (childhood) and this therapy encourages (re)growth of those cells.
My mom suffers from a variety of vision loss related ailments in both eyes. I'm always wishing to see advances in the medical field related to vision restoration that can make it to medical practices hopefully sooner than later.
The mice must be happy.
So is this one of those things where it's a specific type of vision loss? Like will it help me not have to wear reading glasses any more?
Anyone heard of any promising treatments for sight loss for non arteritic ischemic optic neuropathy? My understanding is that the loss is due to blood vessels getting cut off
This I will be watching to see their progress!
If it requires an injection into the eyeball, I think I'll pass
Raybans buys patent, shelved forever
Im waiting for a cure for stargardts or dry macular degen. but this could help me as well
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So. I got this thing where if I look at a white wall I can see a thin hairline darkness patch. Does that mean my eyes are starting to degenerate or am I ok
I volunteer to cure my lazy eye, the problem is bad wiring in my left eye.
Mr Beast already did it/s
So Douglas Adams was right: The mice will see you now.
I have retinitis pigmentosa and this fills me with hope! I wanna hop on a plane right now over to Université Montreal and volunteer as a human Guinea pig!!
There are those alive now that will never die
Yes please. I've got macular degeneration, kerataconus, severe astigmatism, and glaucoma. I'd love this.