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Patients Regain Sight After Groundbreaking Trial (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Doctors have taken a major step towards curing the most common form of blindness in the UK -- age-related macular degeneration. Douglas Waters, 86, could not see out of his right eye, but "I can now read the newspaper" with it, he says. He was one of two patients given pioneering stem cell therapy at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. Cells from a human embryo were grown into a patch that was delicately inserted into the back of the eye.
The macula is the part of the eye that allows you to see straight ahead -- whether to recognize faces, watch TV or read a book. The macula is made up of rods and cones that sense light and behind those are a layer of nourishing cells called the retinal pigment epithelium. When this support layer fails, it causes macular degeneration and blindness. Doctors have devised a way of building a new retinal pigment epithelium and surgically implanting it into the eye. The technique, published in Nature Biotechnology, starts with embryonic stem cells. These are a special type of cell that can become any other in the human body. They are converted into the type of cell that makes up the retinal pigment epithelium and embedded into a scaffold to hold them in place. The living patch is only one layer of cells thick -- about 40 microns -- and 6mm long and 4mm wide. It is then placed underneath the rods and cones in the back of the eye. The operation takes up to two hours.
The macula is the part of the eye that allows you to see straight ahead -- whether to recognize faces, watch TV or read a book. The macula is made up of rods and cones that sense light and behind those are a layer of nourishing cells called the retinal pigment epithelium. When this support layer fails, it causes macular degeneration and blindness. Doctors have devised a way of building a new retinal pigment epithelium and surgically implanting it into the eye. The technique, published in Nature Biotechnology, starts with embryonic stem cells. These are a special type of cell that can become any other in the human body. They are converted into the type of cell that makes up the retinal pigment epithelium and embedded into a scaffold to hold them in place. The living patch is only one layer of cells thick -- about 40 microns -- and 6mm long and 4mm wide. It is then placed underneath the rods and cones in the back of the eye. The operation takes up to two hours.
Get this guy a hacksaw.
But in all seriousness, that's seriously awesome. Was this wet AMD or dry AMD? Because the description doesn't sound like either one.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
we get some medical breakthroughs. I don't think I can handle another SpaceX, 3D printer, virtual reality, cryptocurrency, or Apple story.
None of these things matter if you can't see.
Mostly random stuff.
And asked for the procedure to be reversed.
I'm sure all the old pro-lifers that are going blind will reject this treatment on principle.
You and the rest of your kind take blind comfort in the belief that we are monsters, that you could never do what we did. The key ingredient in the anti-agathic cannot be synthesized. It must be taken from living beings. For one to live forever, another one must die. You will fall upon one another like wolves. It will make what we did pale by comparison. The billions who live forever will be a testimony to my work. And the billions who are murdered to buy that immortality will be the continuance of my work. Not like us? You will become us. That is my monument, Commander.
I don't see how this can help her. ðY
I remember when stem cell therapy was first making the news and getting people excited. It's really nice to read when that sort of basic research pays off with applied medicine. It's seeing the sci-fi books come to you and makes the future look a little more bright.
I don't think I can handle another SpaceX, 3D printer, virtual reality, cryptocurrency, or Apple story.
Then you probably want to avoid medical-breakthrough stories.
3-D printers are starting to be big in medicine. ...
- Building replacement parts of complex organs by printing tissue scaffolds.
- Ditto by seeding them with stem cells (rather than waiting for the body to infiltrate them) and/or putting the right cells in the right place from the start.
- Making practice models for surgeons, before the surgery on the actual patient.
- Making custom prosthetics, dental appliances, crowns,
(I could go on.)
Face it: Sometimes an invention turns out to have an explosion of applications.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is so many levels of awesome, that I have no other words for it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I come to slashdot for stories like this. They lift the spirits. They also remind us that limitations which we thought were "givens" in our existence, are anything but.
Life can be very depressing when you assume that everything you can't do today will never be achievable, and everything that is assumed today is actually true. Breaking walls like this reminds us just how unfounded such assumptions are.
What is not said, is that the scaffolding of those implants is not of the same quality as your natural one, and does not have an infinite lifetime. It only survives about 10-15 years, before you have to repeat the whole thing. And its often not really repeatable, as the operations harm other tissue to the point of failure too.
So it's alright for the elderly, who aren't expected to live that long anymore anyway.
But if you still got half your life ahead of you, this is unfortunately not a solution.
I need a news site that ONLY presents me with stories that actually matter! So mainly science, and real actual RAW observations about things that are happening. NO "he said she sad $X happened". No "Trump did", "Putin did" "$somebody did"! No comments, no interpretations, no fuckin processing by any mind or machine other than me!
(So ideally, stationary fixed cameras with a stereoscopic full sphere viewing field, light field camera and sound field audio in the whole perceptible spectrum with no distortions, running 24/7 without interruption, with only the ability to link to any volume in viewing space and time, so that I can always still look at the context around that.)
but I am not about to sacrifice an innocent baby so to harvest stem cells from it in order for me to see again.
Doing such thing, to me, is insanely, criminally selfish!
So many actually born people want to live and don't get to.
Life ain't fair and it ends in death. Deal with it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why shouldn't life be fair? At the very least, shouldn't it be a goal of our culture to make life more fair?
Yes.
Can we start with the living before we try for the unborn?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Couldn't this be used to treat colorblindness? Like 99% of cases are due to genetic abnormalities in cones. If CRISPR was effective, you could even use host cells but with proper cones