University of Washington School of Medicine researchers are taking a major step in their quest to regenerate damaged retinal cells, testing their method on human cells for the first time.
“When people lose their vision from something like macular degeneration, there’s no way to get it back right now. We’re studying ways to restore that vision, to replace those cells, by stimulating a kind of endogenous stem cell within the retina,” said Tom Reh, a professor of biological structure whose lab is conducting the research. “I think we’ve now been able to get to a point where we can go from having essentially just a retina that’s degenerated to something that’s starting to fix itself again.”
