![]() STEM CELL RESEARCH at the LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, India, involves the generation of reparative tissue in the laboratory, which is used to replace damaged or diseased tissue.
New eye research center in India aims to fix
visual impairments with the help of stem cells
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Among the disorders that Balasubramanian has
targeted is retinitis pigmentosa, a group of inherited diseases that cause
degeneration of the retina (in the back of the eye where millions of photoreceptors
capture light rays that the brain turns into images). "There is no cure
for this and it is certainly a genetic disease," he says. People with retinitis
pigmentosa experience a gradual decline in their vision because the
eye's photoreceptor cells slowly die off.
C-TRACER researchers are trained to think in terms of the full cycle of developing treatments—from laboratory to operating room to clinical rehabilitation, or, as Balasubramanian says, "from bench to bedside." One example of this research is the practice of using stem cells taken from a healthy eye's limbus, the area around the corneastem cells are stored, to create a layer of healthy cells to replace damaged ones in the cornea, the transparent, dome-shaped layer of cells covering the front of the eye. Ophthalmologists do this by creating a patch of cells from a surgically removed slice of the limbus and stitching it to the damaged cornea. Similar limbal stem cell transplant work has been done by physicians at the University of Melbourne's Center for Eye Research Australia and the Bernard O'Brien Institute of Microsurgery in Fitzroy, Australia. Although the stem cell approach was not invented at LV Prasad, the institute has treated about 500 patients with a success rate of nearly 75 percent, Balasubramanian says. C-TRACER and LV Prasad has also tuned its work to pay particular attention to the genetic conditions that lead to visual impairment. C-TRACER will open with a staff of five scientists, 22 graduate students and six clinical researchers. The facility occupies 16,000 square feet (1,485 square meters) on the LV Prasad institute's fifth floor, but plans are to expand to 25,000 square feet (2,320 square meters) by 2009. Champalimaud-funded C-TRACER in an effort to prevent and treat vision-related disease and illness in Portugal, Portuguese-speaking countries and throughout the developing world. The four-year-old foundation also offers a $1.48 million (1 million euro) Champalimaud Vision Award annually to researchers who have provided "major breakthroughs in the understanding of vision or in the alleviation of visual impairment and blindness," says foundation executive committee member João Botelho. This year, the foundation will further its philanthropic medical research support by breaking ground on the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, a Lisbon research center slated to open in October 2010 and serve as the foundation's international headquarters. In addition to the funds that LV Prasad received from Champalimaud to create C-TRACER, the institute will also receive $1 million in funding over the next five years from the Indian Ministry of Science & Technology's Department of Biotechnology. |