US Stem Cell Therapy Brings Blind People Back to Light

Advanced Cell Technology Inc. of Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, has conducted a stem cell therapy trial among 22 blind people since 2011. All subjects have improved their vision, and one of them even recovered. normal status.

Those who participated in this experiment had atrophic age-related macular degeneration or juvenile macular dystrophy. In general, the former will cause the patient's visual center to appear as a black hole, while the latter is an inherited disease that causes premature blindness. Both of these diseases cause people to lose their retinal pigment epithelial cells, which recover lightly accumulated protein and lipid fragments on the retina and provide nutrients and energy to photoreceptors (cells that sense light and transmit signals to the brain). .

Advanced Cell Technologies uses human embryonic stem cells to treat these two common types of blindness, transforming human embryonic stem cells into new retinal pigment epithelial cells, and then transplanting cells from each subject under the retina. The visual acuity of one test subject before the treatment was 20/400 (the expression of the United States visual acuity level, normal vision was 20/20), belonging to the basic blindness of both eyes, and after treatment, the visual acuity returned to 20/40. "With this level of vision, you can get a driver's license," said Gary Repin, CEO of Advanced Technologies.