macular degeneration, macular, diagnosis Secret Passages in the Eyeball – My Macular Degeneration Journey/Journal

Secret Passages in the Eyeball

Back again. Chatty sort, ain’t I? ? I really thought I was done for awhile but I keep finding things; ya know? If (should I even use the word ‘if’?) you are tired of hearing me chatter, please write a page! We are anxious for more offerings. [Lin/Linda: if you haven’t read the pages by our guest authors, click here to see what we are talking about.]

Back to the topic at hand (I am not only chatty, but I go off on tangents, a lot of tangents??☝ ) the most recent thing to land in my inbox is a Medscape article Lin sent me. We are back to the stem cell research!

This article uses a lot of the concepts and vocabulary we have introduced over the months. I will review as we go along – I don’t remember it all myself! – and Lin might help us out with some links to previous pages. Pretty please and thank you.  [I think the best place to learn about stem cells is a short YouTube video.   Also, check out Sue’s early page Research.]

I am signed up for a Janssen Pharmaceutical study with stem cells. Guess who did this study? Do you ever feel LEFT OUT? Once again, I would love to know how to get on the A list for these things. Not sure all the places the study happened, though. One place was Kentucky. Maybe I was a ‘geographic undesirable’? I will have to do a little research after hip hop. (Some things do take precedence!?)

OK. Here we go. I looked up PRELUDE, etc and got routed to Clinical trials.gov. It is only going into phase 2 but the good news is they are recruiting. The better news is they are recruiting at Mid Atlantic Retina, Regillo’s place. Now I am getting stoked. “Watson!…The game is afoot!”

Shoot off an email later and get ready to accost Regillo when I see him in December. One other person who is only starting to realize the depths of my tenacity! (Cue Vincent Price laughter!)

OK. Enough nonsense….for now?. From the looks of things, PRELUDE was a study checking, for at least one thing, the feasibility of a delivery system. If you recall, we talked about ways of delivering stem cells to the back of the eye where they belong before. No just shooting them into the vitreous fluid where they roll around like loose cannon balls and end up who knows where. No, no, no! They must be placed. The way they are placed is to thread them through the subretinal space.

Now I am thinking the suprachoroidal space and the subretinal space are the same thing but I really don’t know. [The title of the article I linked to above is “Subretinal Delivery of Cells via the Suprachoroidal Space: Janssen Trial”.] How many ‘secret passages’ can an eyeball have? Be that as it may, the whole idea is to snake through this space (or spaces?) and get to the back of the eyeball without violating the integrity of the vitreous and opening it to infection.

The progress of the implanted cells in this study was checked with microperimetry. This appears to be an up and coming imagining technique we also talked about. It is a technique that tests which parts of the retina are working and how well they are actually working.

Which brings me to my word limit and bedtime. I have been to hip hop and back and need to take a bath and get ready for bed.

I did find what I think is the original journal article for this as well as the clinicaltrials.gov listing. I will follow up….tomorrow.

written October 16th, 2017

Next: coming soon!

 

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