8:00 pm and I am rewarding myself. I just had a piece of chocolate and I am playing dance music on my iPad. This was the second day in a row I have felt as if I have actually accomplished something. Hallelujah. The to do list is starting to dwindle!
It won’t stay that way. Of course not. I know me. Besides, it is not good to become redundant. Meaning and purpose are like air. We need them to survive. Stay busy!
And on that note, I guess I should stop waxing philosophical and get to work here.
Lin sent me another article. As I alluded to on the last page, this one was about the development of a membrane to support the stem cell-derived RPEs. The research just keeps moving along!
It turns out this new development is coming out of Southern California. Specifically, the University of Southern California, the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Stop there a minute. University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB)? Pete Coffey is at UCSB! The good Professor Coffey is co-director of their Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology department. Gee, do you think there could be a connection? ? [Lin/Linda here: Professor Coffey is one of the researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London who conducted the clinical trial that recently made the news with positive results of a similar trial conducted with 2 participants with wet AMD. He is also Director of the London Project to Cure Blindness. I found out that he splits his time 50-50 between University College London (UCL) and University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). He isn’t directly involved in this study but does collaborate with the UCSB researchers.]
OK. Now it’s time to stop being a smart a** and tell you what they did; right? Right!
What they did was develop a “bioengineered implant consisting of stem cell-derived, mature, polarized retinal pigment epithelial cells in a single layer on an ultrathin synthetic parylene membrane”. Yikes. Let’s ‘unpack’ that as the saying goes.
Wikipedia gives an obscenely long and complicated explanation of bioengineering. You can look at it and figure it out if you wish. The definition in thefreedictionary.com was more simply “the application of engineering principles and technology to the field of biology, especially biomedicine, as in the development of prostheses, biomaterials, and medical devices and instruments.”
We have gone over stem cells quite extensively. We also mentioned that RPEs are polarized but I will go into that a little more deeply. In biology having polarity means the cell has distinct anterior and posterior parts. There is a ‘head’ and a ‘tail’. If they don’t line up right, they don’t work right.
Parylene is a polymer and is ‘green chemistry’. I refer you back to Wikipedia if you are interested in reading more. Social scientist here!
The purpose of putting the stem cell-derived RPEs on a membrane was to support them and and maintain their polarity. The patch was delivered to the back of the eye via the subretinal space (which we have talked about before) during an outpatient surgical procedure.
So how did they do? Apparently pretty well. Bear in mind it was only a phase 1/2a trial and there were only a few subjects, but the ‘patch’ seems to have integrated well and some of the people showed improvement in visual acuity.
For you on the west coast: they are enrolling subjects in six, different locations in California and Arizona. The clinical trial number is NCT02590692. If you are interested, get crackin’! Their numbers will be very small.