A team of doctors, engineers and scientists — including UC Santa Barbara stem cell researchers Dennis Clegg, Lincoln Johnson, Sherry Hikita and Britney Pennington — has published the preliminary results of a first-in-human clinical trial for dry AMD. Four patients received implants consisting of human embryonic stem cell-derived retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), which support light-sensitive photoreceptor cells critical to vision. The phase 1/2A trial, led by Dr. Amir Kashani, is being conducted at the University of Southern California Roski Eye Institute at the campus’s Keck School of Medicine. 

The London Project to Cure Blindness, headed by Pete Coffey of the UC Santa Barbara Center for Stem Cell Biology and Engineering and Neuroscience Research Institute, has reported initial findings from a clinical trial.

Results from this groundbreaking study, published in Nature Biotechnology, describe the safe and effective implantation of a specially engineered patch of retinal pigment epithelium cells derived from embryonic stem cells to treat people with sudden severe sight loss from wet age-related macular degeneration.