The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the state's stem cell agency, has awarded a two-year, $6 million grant to a team at the USC Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Institute for Biomedical Therapeutics and the USC Roski Eye Institute advancing a new treatment for one of the leading causes of blindness in older adults. The funding will enable the researchers to conduct preclinical studies needed before launching human trials.
The investigators aim to accelerate progress in fighting dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which affects about 16 million people in the U.S. The disease is rooted in damage to the eye's retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), the cells that support the photoreceptors of the retina.
RPE cells protect, feed, and restore the rods and cones that convert light into signals readable by the brain. Dry AMD, which typically manifests in people 50 and older, is currently incurable and can eventually render those suffering legally blind. Treatment options are presently limited to well-established vitamin supplements and newly emerged immune-regulating treatments, both of which can only slow the progression of dry AMD.
The USC strategy supported by CIRM takes an entirely different approach -; an injection containing a mixture of the restorative, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant compounds that are released by stem cell-derived healthy RPE. Nothing that's currently out there halts or reverses the disease, and many patients end up progressing to.