I have paid a lot of attention to the male movers and shakers in vision research. Perhaps it is time to note the contributes of the women. Recently I have come upon short articles about the research of two.
Sally Temple, SUNY-Albany, and her colleagues recently published a paper on how nicotinamide can suppress the progression of AMD. Nicotinamide is a vitamin B3 derivative.
Dr. Temple took pluripotent cells, that is stem cells, from people who had AMD and those who did not. She manipulated the stem cells to become retinal pigmentation epithelial cells and grew them in her lab.
One of the first things Temple and her team noted was the cells from the AMD people acted differently from the RPEs grown from healthy subjects’ cells. The cells from people with AMD produced different chemicals. The chemicals were the same ones that figure in the production of drusen and contribute to inflammation.
These were RPEs growing on a culture medium in a glass dish. There was nothing else to contribute to the formation of the chemicals. The chemicals had to be coming from the RPEs. And, with no other possible influences, the cause for the production of these chemicals pretty much had to be genetic.
The fault, dear readers, is not in ourselves but in our genes. One more tally in the genes are destiny column.
But the good news is, when they squirted (or whatever) nicotinamide on the offending RPEs, things improved. Chemicals that are responsible for the bad things were less and the RPEs survived longer.
Perhaps if we find a way to get nicotinamide directly into eyes, we will get the same results in vivo as in vitro. Worth a try.
Masayo Takahashi is a Japanese researcher. Takahashi has been experimenting using pluripotent cells taken from the same people they are going back into. No embryonic cells required.
There is excitement about this new procedure not only because of ethical issues. There are indications this procedure will be cheaper and faster to implement. In additional, they are thinking people can ‘bank’ their stem cells. These can be used either for ‘repairs’ in the original cell ‘owner’ or they can be given to other people who are immune matched. (Sort of like blood type matching. Don’t want the body getting up in arms over the ‘invading’ materials.)
Bottom line is the ladies are out there rocking it just like the men. They continue to come up with great new findings and each one takes us a little bit closer to effective treatments and maybe – just maybe – even a cure.
To copy Lin’s use of old song titles, “sisters are doing’ it for themselves”. And they are doing it for us, too!
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