UCL in the News: Pigs raise hopes for blindness cure

More than 500,000 people in the UK have irreversible blindness caused by macular degeneration. …

The disease is marked by a progressive loss of central vision due to degeneration of the macula. …

Now the first success has been recorded by a London-led team given £4 million by an anonymous American philanthropist, who saw his father go blind, towards the cost of developing a stem cell therapy. …

Prof Pete Coffey and Lyndon da Cruz, an eye surgeon, of the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, have teamed up with Prof Peter Andrews, of the University of Sheffield, to take the treatment into hospitals. …

"The results are really encouraging," says Prof Coffey. "We plan to do the first patient within three years." …

"I was over the moon when I got the results because it is a proof of concept," says Prof Coffey. "We really can do it."

The operation on three sighted pigs took only 30 minutes, suggesting the stem cell implants could eventually become a routine outpatient operation, they told an event backed by the company Mostra at the Globe Theatre to promote the London Project to Cure Blindness - a scientific initiative between UCL, Moorfields and The University of Sheffield. …

As a human trial run for the operations, the team has also repaired the vision of four out of 12 patients with the wet form of macular degeneration by moving around their own tissue within the eye. …

Prof Coffey has now found a way to turn stem cells taken from early human embryos surplus to test tube baby clinic into RPE cells by adding growth factors and it was these derived human RPE cells that were implanted into the eyes of the pigs.

"Now we have to get clinical grade cells produced, which is under way in Sheffield for phase one trials," says Prof Coffey.