A LEADING cause of blindness could one day be treatable using stem cell therapy. Rats with a degenerative eye disease similar to macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in older people, have had their vision rescued by implants derived from human embryonic stem cells.
A team led by Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, was able to persuade human embryonic stem cells to grow into cells resembling retinal pigment epithelial cells. These are the cells which support the photoreceptors in the retina, and without them the photoreceptors do not survive.
When injected into rats with…
