World’s First for AMD Stem Cell Therapy

September 16, 2014

(Optometry Today) – A patient in Japan has become the first person to be treated with a stem cell treatment for age –related macular degeneration (AMD). In a world first, researchers at the RIKEN Centre for Developmental Biology (CDB), in Kobe, Japan, used induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to grow a thin sheet of retinal pigment epithelial cells, which have been implanted directly into the patient’s retina to replace diseased tissue. The iPS cells were generated using skin cells taken from the patient’s arm, which were reprogrammed to revert to an embryonic-like state.