Stem cell treatment for AMD

This is what a patient with age-related macular degeneration (ARMD) sees.

News on 2/17/2013:

TOKYO — Researchers in Japan have moved one step closer to clinical trials using adult stem cells in a therapy they hope will prove a cure for common sight problems.

The ethics committee at the Institute for Biomedical Research and Innovation in Kobe, last Wednesday approved a trial treatment for age-related macular degeneration (AMD) using induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells.

The trial is aimed at creating retinal cells that can be transplanted into the eyes of patients suffering from AMD, a presently incurable disease that affects mostly middle-aged and older people and can lead to blindness.

Stem cell treatment vs artificial retina implant: the race is now on.

Artificial retina

[The Argus II device consists of special glasses outfitted with a video camera and a video processing unit that sends signals to a wireless receiver implanted in the eye.]

It took USD 200 million and 14 years for Second Sight Medical Products Inc of Sylmar, CA, to out-compete others and become the first to gain FDA approval for its artificial retina.

This is a good start. Indeed, much higher resolution is still needed, for one thing. The company plans to keep improving the treatment, which they hope will ultimately be used to treat age-related macular degeneration. For now, there are limitations:

(1) The FDA approved the system as a humanitarian use device, an approval that is limited to fewer than 4,000 people in the United States each year.
(2) The device is limited to adults 25 or older, with severe to profound retinitis pigmentosa who have no light perception or bare light perception, in which they can perceive light but cannot tell where it is coming from.
(3) The system will cost more than $100,000 when it is launched in the United States. And
(4) Although it does not completely restore vision, the implant helps with daily activities, such as locating objects and recognizing large letters and shapes.

[Sources: FoxNews and UDN News]

Aspirin and AMD

Two studies suggest a increasing risk of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) with aspiring use:

JAMA 12/2012:

Among an adult cohort, aspirin use 5 years prior to observed incidence was not associated with incident early or late AMD. However, regular aspirin use 10 years prior was associated with a small but statistically significant increase in the risk of incident late and neovascular AMD.

This is in support of an earlier study:

Ophthalmology 1/2012:

Early AMD was present in 36.4% of the participants and late AMD was present in 3.3% of participants. Monthly aspirin use was reported by 1931 (41.2%), at least once weekly by 7%, and daily use by 17.3%. For daily aspirin users, the ORs, adjusted for potential confounders, showed a steady increase with increasing severity of AMD grades.

An image of DNA

This image, captured by electron microscopy, shows a thread of several interwoven DNA molecules. The double helix structure of DNA was discovered 59 years ago by James Watson and Francis Crick [photo by Enzo Di Fabrizio, the Magna Graecia University, Catanzaro, Italy]

Dark Matter

This giant map of invisible dark matter recorded in four directions by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope during each season of the year was released on Jan. 9, 2012. The color inset shows the previous largest COSMOS dark matter map and the size of the full moon (as it would appear to the telescope) to scale. [CREDIT: Van Waerbeke, Heymans, and CFHTLens collaboration.]

Dark matter clusters and filaments constitute 98% of the matter in the universe. Mapping is possible through gravitational lensing effect, i.e., light paths from distant objects bent by gravitational pulls of the dark matter before reaching Earth.

A movie by the same name can be seen here.

The/A Higgs Field

[The/A Higgs boson may have been found, CERN announced on 7/4/2012]

From CERN: "A major breakthrough in particle physics came in the 1970s when physicists realized that there are very close ties between two of the four fundamental forces – namely, the weak force and the electromagnetic force. The two forces can be described within the same theory, which forms the basis of the Standard Model. This ‘unification’ implies that electricity, magnetism, light and some types of radioactivity are all manifestations of a single underlying force called, unsurprisingly, the electroweak force. But in order for this unification to work mathematically, it requires that the force-carrying particles have no mass. We know from experiments that this is not true, so physicists Peter Higgs, Robert Brout and François Englert came up with a solution to solve this conundrum.

They suggested that all particles had no mass just after the Big Bang. As the Universe cooled and the temperature fell below a critical value, an invisible force field called the ‘Higgs field’ was formed together with the associated ‘Higgs boson’. The field prevails throughout the cosmos: any particles that interact with it are given a mass via the Higgs boson. The more they interact, the heavier they become, whereas particles that never interact are left with no mass at all. "

It now appears that CERN has evidence of the presence of the/a Higgs particle and by implication, the/a Higgs Field. Very impressive.

The Big Bang Theory

Since the Big Bang started everything, including the eye/vision, we thought it relevant to present it here:

The Laws of Physics apparently had created something from nothing; although it is still unknown how the Laws came into being in the first place.