RGC regeneration

Therapeutic retinal ganglion cell regeneration has departed from the realm of fantasy and entered into the reality of clinical trials, reported Jeffrey Goldberg MD, director of clinical research, Shiley Centre, UCSD, San Diego, US, at the World Congress of Ophthalmology in Tokyo.

“While we focus on controlling the pressure in the front of the eye, the damage is happening in the back of the eye.  The fundamental problem we have with vision loss and vision restoration in glaucoma is that there is no retinal ganglion cell regeneration after optic nerve injury. The cells die and there is no endogenous replacement,” he noted.

He then described promising animal studies in which implanted retinal ganglion cells  showed evidence of growing both dendrites into the retina and axons along the retinal nerve fibre layer and across the optic chiasm. This suggests that it may be possible to transplant RGC cells even in the very late stages of glaucoma, he said.

He then reviewed his group’s latest data from their pioneering research with the Neurotech NT501 implant, a 1.0x 3.0 mm implant containing RPE cells primed via gene therapy to produce ciliary neurotrophic factor. Eleven patients in two clini