Turning Back the Clock on Aged Eye Cells
In This Article
- A team of researchers at Mass Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have successfully restored vision in elderly mice by turning back the clock on their aged nerve cells in the retina to recapture their youthful function
- The team used an adeno-associated virus as a vehicle to deliver into the retinas of mice three youth-restoring genes— Oct4, Sox2 and Klf4—that are normally switched on during embryonic development
- These findings represent the first demonstration that it may be possible to safely reprogram complex tissues, such as the nerve cells of the eye, to an earlier age
A team of researchers at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have successfully restored vision in elderly mice by turning back the clock on their aged nerve cells in the retina to recapture their youthful function. The team used an adeno-associated virus (AAV) as a vehicle to deliver into the retinas of mice three youth-restoring genes—Oct4, Sox2 and Klf4—that are normally switched on during embryonic development.
Subscribe to the latest updates from Ophthalmology Advances in Motion
Researcher Zhigang He, PhD, BM, professor of Neurology and Ophthalmology at HMS, worked with HMS scientists David Sinclair, PhD, professor of Genetics, and Yuancheng Lu, PhD, a research fellow in Genetics, to test whether the regenerative capacity of young animals could be imparted to adult mice, delivering a modified three-gene combination via an AAV into retinal ganglion cells of adult mice with optic nerve injury. The treatment resulted in a two-fold increase in the number of surviving retinal ganglion cells after the injury and a five-fold increase in nerve regrowth.
Regenerating Axons After Optic Nerve Crush in the Aged Mice Given OSK Treatment
Following the encouraging findings, scientists at Schepens Eye Research Institute of Mass Eye and Ear, Bruce Ksander, PhD, associate scientist and associate professor of Ophthalmology at HMS, and Meredith Gregory-Ksander, PhD, associate scientist and assistant professor of Ophthalmology at HMS, then led the additional vision experiments that demonstrated further proof-of-concept with the reversal of both age-related and glaucoma vision loss in a mice model.
These findings, published last month in Nature, represent the first demonstration that it may be possible to safely reprogram complex tissues, such as the nerve cells of the eye, to an earlier age.
This promising research may ultimately lead to a new class of therapeutics that could restore vision that has already been lost.
Learn more about Ophthalmology at Mass Eye and Ear/Mass General
Refer a patient to the Mass Eye and Ear/Mass General Department of Ophthalmology