USC Keck School of Medicine

Encouraging news about CIRM-funded clinical trial targeting vision loss

/ Kevin McCormack / 3 Comments
dry AMD

An eye affected by dry age-related macular degeneration

Dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of vision loss in the U.S. By 2020 it’s estimated that as many as three million Americans will be affected by the disease. Right now, there is no effective therapy. But that could change. A new CIRM-funded clinical trial is showing promise in helping people battling the disease not just in stabilizing their vision loss, but even reversing it.

In AMD, cells in the retina, the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye, are slowly destroyed affecting a person’s central vision. It can make it difficult to do everyday activities such as reading or watching TV and make it impossible for a person to drive.

Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) Roski Eye Institute at the Keck School of Medicine, and Regenerative Patch Technologies, have developed a therapy using embryonic stem cells that they turned into retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells – the kind of cell destroyed by AMD. These cells were then placed on a synthetic scaffold which was surgically implanted in the back of the eye.

Imaging studies showed that the RPE cells appeared to integrate well into the eye and remained in place during follow-up tests 120 to 365 days after implantation.

Encouraging results

Of the five patients enrolled in the Phase 1/2a trial, four maintained their vision in the treated eye, two showed improvement in the stability of their vision, and one patient had a 17-letter improvement in their vision on a reading chart. In addition, there were no serious side effects or unanticipated problems.

There were other indications the implants were proving beneficial.  People with normal vision have the ability to focus their gaze on a single location. People with advanced AMD lose that ability. In this trial, two of the patients recovered stable fixation. These improvements were maintained in follow-up tests.

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Abla Creasey, Ph.D., CIRM’S Vice President of Therapeutics and Strategic Infrastructure says even these small benefits are important:

“Having a therapy with a favorable safety profile, that could slow down the progression, or even reverse the vision loss would benefit millions of Americans. That’s why these results, while still in an early stage are encouraging, because the people treated in the trial are ones most severely affected by the disease who have the least potential for visual recovery.”

This study reflects CIRM’s long-term commitment to supporting the most promising stem cell research. The Stem Cell Agency began supporting USC’s Dr. Mark Humayun, the lead inventor of the implant, in 2010 and has been a partner with him and his team since then.

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In a news release Dr. Humayun said they plan to recruit another 15 patients to see if these results hold up:

“Our study shows that this unique stem cell–based retinal implant thus far is well-tolerated, and preliminary results suggest it may help people with advanced dry age-related macular degeneration.”

While the results, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, are encouraging the researchers caution that this was a very early stage clinical trial, with a small number of patients. They say the next step is to continue to follow the four patients treated in this trial to see if there are any further changes to their vision, and to conduct a larger trial.

 

 

How mice and zebrafish are unlocking clues to repairing damaged hearts

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Bee-Gees

The Bee Gees, pioneers in trying to find ways to mend a broken heart. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives

This may be the first time that the Australian pop group the Bee Gees have ever been featured in a blog about stem cell research, but in this case I think it’s appropriate. One of the Bee Gees biggest hits was “How can you mend a broken heart” and while it was a fine song, Barry and Robin Gibb (who wrote the song) never really came up with a viable answer.

Happily some researchers at the University of Southern California may succeed where Barry and Robin failed. In a study, published in the journal Nature Genetics, the USC team identify a gene that may help regenerate damaged heart tissue after a heart attack.

When babies are born they have a lot of a heart muscle cell called a mononuclear diploid cardiomyocyte or MNDCM for short. This cell type has powerful regenerative properties and so is able to rebuild heart muscle. However, as we get older we have less and less MNDCMs. By the time most of us are at an age where we are most likely to have a heart attack we are also most likely to have very few of these cells, and so have a limited ability to repair the damage.

Michaela Patterson, and her colleagues at USC, set out to find ways to change that. They found that in some adult mice less than 2 percent of their heart cells were MNDCMs, while other mice had a much higher percentage, around 10 percent. Not surprisingly the mice with the higher percentage of MNDCMs were better able to regenerate heart muscle after a heart attack or other injury.

So the USC team – with a little help from CIRM funding – dug a little deeper and did a genome-wide association study of these mice, that’s where they look at all the genetic variants in different individuals to see if they can spot common traits. They found one gene, Tnni3k, that seems to play a key role in generating MNDCMs.

Turning Tnni3K off in mice resulted in higher numbers of MNDCMs, increasing their ability to regenerate heart muscle. But when they activated Tnni3k in zebrafish it reduced the number of MNDCMs and impaired the fish’s ability to repair heart damage.

While it’s a long way from identifying something interesting in mice and zebrafish to seeing if it can be used to help people, Henry Sucov, the senior author on the study, says these findings represent an important first step in that direction:

“The activity of this gene, Tnni3k, can be modulated by small molecules, which could be developed into prescription drugs in the future. These small molecules could change the composition of the heart over time to contain more of these regenerative cells. This could improve the potential for regeneration in adult hearts, as a preventative strategy for those who may be at risk for heart failure.”

 

 

 

Seeing is believing: how some scientists – including two funded by CIRM – are working to help the blind see

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retinitis pigmentosas_1

How retinitis pigmentosa destroys vision – new stem cell research may help reverse that

“A pale hue”. For most of us that is a simple description, an observation about color. For Kristin Macdonald it’s a glimpse of the future. In some ways it’s a miracle. Kristin lost her sight to retinitis pigmentosa (RP). For many years she was virtually blind. But now, thanks to a clinical trial funded by CIRM she is starting to see again.

Kristin’s story is one of several examples of restoring sight in an article entitled “Why There’s New Hope About Ending Blindness” in the latest issue of National Geographic.  The article explores different approaches to treating people who were either born without vision or lost their vision due to disease or injury.

Two of those stories feature research that CIRM has funded. One is the work that is helping Kristin. Retinitis pigmentosa is a relatively rare condition that destroys the photoreceptors at the back of the eye, the cells that actually allow us to sense light. The National Geographic piece highlights how a research team at the University of California, Irvine, led by Dr. Henry Klassen, has been working on a way to use stem cells to replace and repair the cells damaged by RP.

“Klassen has spent 30 years studying how to coax progenitor cells—former stem cells that have begun to move toward being specific cell types—into replacing or rehabilitating failed retinal cells. Having successfully used retinal progenitor cells to improve vision in mice, rats, cats, dogs, and pigs, he’s testing a similar treatment in people with advanced retinitis pigmentosa.”

We recently blogged about this work and the fact that this team just passed it’s first major milestone – – showing that in the first nine patients treated none experienced any serious side effects. A Phase 1 clinical trial like this is designed to test for safety, so it usually involves the use of relatively small numbers of cells. The fact that some of those treated, like Kristin, are showing signs of improvement in their vision is quite encouraging. We will be following this work very closely and reporting new results as soon as they are available.

The other CIRM-supported research featured in the article is led by what the writer calls “an eyeball dream team” featuring University of Southern California’s Dr. Mark Humayun, described as “a courteous, efficient, impeccably besuited man.” And it’s true, he is.

The team is developing a stem cell device to help treat age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in the US.

“He and his fellow principal investigator, University of California, Santa Barbara stem cell biologist Dennis Clegg, call it simply a patch. That patch’s chassis, made of the same stuff used to coat wiring for pacemakers and neural implants, is wafer thin, bottle shaped, and the size of a fat grain of rice. Onto this speck Clegg distributes 120,000 cells derived from embryonic stem cells.”

Humayun and Clegg have just started their clinical trial with this work so it is likely going to be some time before we have any results.

These are just two of the many different approaches, using several different methods, to address vision loss. The article is a fascinating read, giving you a sense of how science is transforming people’s lives. It’s also wonderfully written by David Dobbs, including observations like this:

“Neuroscientists love the eye because “it’s the only place you see the brain without drilling a hole,” as one put it to me.”

For a vision of the future, a future that could mean restoring vision to those who have lost it, it’s a terrific read.

 

New approach could help turn back the clock and reverse damage for stroke patients

/ Kevin McCormack / 4 Comments
stroke

Stroke: courtesy WebMD

Stroke is the leading cause of serious, long-term disability in the US. Every year almost 800,000 people suffer from a stroke. The impact on their lives, and the lives of those around them can be devastating.

Right now the only treatment approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tissue plasminogen activator or tPA. This helps dissolve the blood clot causing most strokes and restores blood flow to the brain. However, to be fully effective this has to be administered within about 3-4 hours after the stroke. Many people are unable to get to the hospital in time and as a result suffer long-term damage, damage that for most people has been permanent.

But now a new study in Nature Medicine shows that might not be the case, and that this damage could even be reversible.

The research, done by a team at the University of Southern California (USC) uses a one-two punch combination of stem cells and a protein that helps those cells turn into neurons, the cells in the brain damaged by a stroke.

First, the researchers induced a stroke in mice and then transplanted human neural stem cells alongside the damaged brain tissue. They then added in a dose of the protein 3K3A-APC or a placebo.

hey found that mice treated with 3K3A-APC had 16 times more human stem-cell derived neurons than the mice treated with the placebo. Those neurons weren’t just sitting around doing nothing. USC’s Berislav Zlokovic, senior author of the paper, says they were actively repairing the stroke-induced damage.

“We showed that 3K3A-APC helps the grafted stem cells convert into neurons and make structural and functional connections with the host’s nervous system. No one in the stroke field has ever shown this, so I believe this is going to be the gold standard for future studies. Functional deficits after five weeks of stroke were minimized, and the mice were almost back to normal in terms of motor and sensorimotor functions. Synapses formed between transplanted cells and host cells, so there is functional activation and cooperation of transplanted cells in the host circuitry.”

The researchers wanted to make sure the transplanted cell-3K3A-ACP combination was really the cause of the improvement in the mice so they then used what’s called an “assassin toxin” to kill the neurons they had created. That reversed the improvements in the treated mice, leaving them comparable to the untreated mice. All this suggests the neurons had become an integral part of the mouse’s brain.

So how might this benefit people? You may remember that earlier this summer Stanford researchers produced a paper showing they had helped some 18 stroke patients, by injecting stem cells from donor bone marrow into their brain. The improvements were significant, including in at least one case regaining the ability to walk. We blogged about that work here

In that study, however, the cells did not become neurons nor did they seem to remain in the brain for an extended period. It’s hoped this new work can build on that by giving researchers an additional tool, the 3K3A-ACP protein, to help the transplanted cells convert to neurons and become integrated into the brain.

One of the other advantages of using this protein is that it has already been approved by the FDA for use in people who have experienced an ischemic stroke, which accounts for about 87 percent of all strokes.

The USC team now hope to get approval from the FDA to see if they can replicate their experiences in mice in people, through a Phase 2 clinical trial.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

National honor for helping “the blind see”

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

Those of us fortunate to have good health take so many things for granted, not the least of which is our ability to see. But, according to the World Health Organization, there are 39 million people worldwide who are blind, and another 246 million who are visually impaired. Any therapy, any device, that can help change that is truly worthy of celebration.

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Dr. Mark Humayun: Photo courtesy USC

That’s why we are celebrating the news that Professor Mark Humayun has been awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation’s top technology honor, by President Obama.

Humayun, a researcher at USC’s Keck School of Medicine and a CIRM grantee, is being honored for his work in developing an artificial retina, one that enables people with a relatively rare kind of blindness to see again.

But we are also celebrating the potential of his work that we are funding that could help restore sight to millions of people suffering from the leading cause of blindness among the elderly. But we’ll get back to that in a minute.

First, let’s talk about the invention that has earned him this prestigious award. It’s called the Argus II and it can help people with retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited degenerative disease that slowly destroys a person’s vision. It affects around 100,000 Americans.

The Argus II uses a camera mounted on glasses that send signals to an electronic receiver that has been implanted inside the eye. The receiver then relays those signals through the optic nerve to the brain where they are interpreted as a visual image.

In a story posted on the USC website, USC President C. L. Max Nikias praised Humayun’s work:

“He dreamed the impossible: to help the blind see. With fearless imagination, bold leadership and biomedical expertise, he and his team made that dream come true with the world’s first artificial retina. USC is tremendously proud to be Professor Humayun’s academic home.”

At CIRM we are tremendously proud to be funding the clinical trial that Humayun and his team are running to find a stem cell therapy for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of vision loss in the world.  It’s estimated that by 2020 more than 6 million Americans will suffer from AMD.

Humayun’s team is using embryonic stem cells to produce the support cells, or RPE cells, needed to replace those lost in AMD. We recently produced this video that highlights this work, and other CIRM-funded work that targets vision loss.

In a statement released by the White House honoring all the winners, President Obama said:

“Science and technology are fundamental to solving some of our nation’s biggest challenges. The knowledge produced by these Americans today will carry our country’s legacy of innovation forward and continue to help countless others around the world. Their work is a testament to American ingenuity.”

Which is why we are honored to be partners with Humayun and his team in advancing this research and, hopefully, helping find a treatment for millions of people who dream of one day being able to see again.