Japanese man becomes world’s first to have someone else’s stem cells transplanted unto his eye

A Japanese man received a pioneering retinal cell transplant grown from donor stem cells instead of his own in what is reported as the world’s first.

Doctors took skin cells from a donor bank and reprogrammed them into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which can be coaxed to grow into most cell types in the body.

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For this procedure, the physicians grew the iPS cells into a type of retinal cell, and then injected them into the retina of the patient’s right eye.

The test subject was a man in his 60s who has been living with age-related macular degeneration – a currently incurable eye disease that slowly leads to loss of vision.

If this news sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because the same team of Japanese doctors successfully performed a similar transplant in 2014. But in that case, the iPS cells came from the patient’s own skin, not from a donor.

 

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