Stem cell therapies for retinal diseases: from bench to bedside
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REVIEW
Stem cell therapies for retinal diseases: from bench to bedside Yuening Shen 1,2 Received: 4 February 2020 / Revised: 2 July 2020 / Accepted: 6 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract As the human retina has no regenerative ability, stem cell interventions represent potential therapies for various blinding retinal diseases. This type of therapy has been extensively studied in the human eyes through decades of preclinical studies. The safety profiles shown in clinical trials thus far have indicated that these strategies should be further explored. There are still challenges with regard to cell source, cell delivery, immuno-related adverse events and long-term maintenance of the therapeutic effects. Retinal stem cell therapy is likely to be most successful with a combination of multiple technologies, such as gene therapy. The purpose of this review is to present a synthetical and systematic coverage of stem cell therapies that target retinal diseases from bench to bedside, intending to appeal to both junior specialists and the broader community of clinical investigators alike. This review will only focus on therapies that have already been studied in clinical trials. This review summarizes key concepts, highlights the main studies in human patients and discusses the current challenges and potential methods to reduce safety concerns while enhancing the therapeutic effects. Keywords Stem cells . Cell therapy . Retina . Retinal degeneration . Retinal ischaemia . Transplantation
Introduction Currently, there are at least 36 million people who are blind and over 210 million people with visual impairment [1]. These figures have dramatically increased [2]. Retinal degeneration, including age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and inherited retinal degeneration, such as retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and Stargardt disease (SD), together with glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy (DR), remains the leading cause of irreversible blindness and vision impairment worldwide [1, 3]. As the global population is growing and ageing, the number of affected people is expected to grow [1, 4]. Retinal degenerative diseases can be characterized by progressive dysfunction and loss of photoreceptor cells and/or other retinal cell types in pathological mechanism and subsequent stepwise vision loss Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00109-020-01960-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Yuening Shen [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London , 11-43 Bath St, London EC1V 9EL, UK
2
Department of Medical Retina, Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, 162 City Road, London EC1V 2PD, UK
in clinical presentation [3, 5]. DR can affect both working-age adults and people of advanced age [6]. Affecting more than 70 million people globally, glaucoma is the second leading cause of irreversible visual impairment [3, 7]. Given that these ret
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