MERCURYNEWS – April 17, 2017: Lab-grown cells could refurbish diseased or damaged eyes. A Stanford research team has created a potentially powerful new way to fix damaged corneas — a major source of vision problems and blindness.
“One of the exciting possibilities of this cellular approach is that one donor cornea,” which contributes a few parent cells, “can generate enough cells to treat tens or hundreds of patients,” said lead researcher Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg, professor and chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Other scientists have been trying to grow full corneas from scratch, but Stanford’s innovative strategy, eight years in the making, is to grow individual cells instead.
The team then harvests a few “mother” corneal cells, called progenitor cells, donated from a cadaver.
These cells are then put into a warm broth in petri dishes, where they give birth to many new young corneal cells. Link: Read Complete Article
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