In celebration of CIRM’s 20th anniversary, we are reflecting on some of the early projects we supported that have since advanced to clinical trials. 

One such trial for a form of blindness originated with a 2007 SEED grant to David Hinton, MD, of the University of Southern California (USC) and later with a 2008 Disease Team Planning grant to Dr. Hinton’s long-time collaborator Mark Humayun, MD, PhD, also at USC. Dr. Humayun and Dr. Hinton collaborated with Dennis Clegg, PhD, of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and together they received a Disease Team Award. Altogether, the group has received nearly $40 million for their work, leading to a stem cell therapy for blindness.

The team was focused on the most common form of blindness, age-related macular degeneration or AMD, which affects about 200 million people worldwide. With AMD, cells at the back of the eye called the retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE) break down and can no longer support cells of the retina, which detect light and allow us to see. Without the RPE cells, retinal cells degenerate, and people slowly lose their vision.

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