Feature
Retinal Transplants: Hope to Preserve and Restore Vision
Transplantation of retinal progenitor cell layers may be a viable treatment for devastating eye diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. In several studies of animals with retinal degeneration, transplants of intact sheets of immature retinal cells improved vision—a finding that was validated in recent clinical research in humans. However, data from more patients are needed to confirm this as a valid therapy.
The retina in the back of the eye contains two kinds of photoreceptor cells that are highly specialized for the detection of light—rods and cones. Rods are very sensitive to low levels of light (enabling vision at night) and to motion, and they are distributed evenly all over the retina, although they form a high-density ring around the macula, which is located in the center of the retina. Cones, on the other hand, are important for color vision in daylight; they are concentrated in the fovea in the center of the macula, which is responsible for sharp central vision.
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