News & Media

November 24, 2015

More than seven million people in the US struggle to see. While most are not completely blind they have difficulty with, or simply can’t do, daily tasks most of us take for granted. CIRM has committed more than $100 million to 17 projects trying to solve this unmet medical need. Two of those projects have begun clinical trials testing cell therapies in patients. 

November 18, 2015

An award-winning essay by Dr. Sherry Hikita, former director of the Stem Cell Core at UC Santa Barbara, and now a research scientist at Asterias Biotherapeutics, describes her motivation to do stem cell research.

September 28, 2015

A clinical trial using stem cell-derived ocular cells for the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) has been initiated in England. This was a major milestone for the London Project to Cure Blindness, which aims to cure vision loss in people with wet AMD. The organization was founded 10 years ago by UC Santa Barbara’s Peter Coffey, a professor at the campus’s Neuroscience Research Institute. “Cellular therapy has tremendous potential for treating all types of age-related macular degeneration,” said Coffey’s colleague Dennis Clegg, the Wilcox Family Chair in BioMedicine in UCSB’s Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. “Regenerative medicine using stem cells will likely become a major weapon to fight many diseases.” 

The surgery was performed on a patient last month and no complications have arisen to date. The team hopes to determine the patient’s outcome in terms of initial visual recovery by early December.

September 21, 2015

Researchers from UC Santa Barbara, the University of Wisonsin-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research in Madison have developed a screening system for predicting developmental neurotoxicity — damage caused to nervous tissue by toxic substances — using stem cells to model features of the developing human brain. The findings appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. One possible use in the application of the research involves reducing the number of drug failures in clinical trials and offering a cost-effective approach for assessing chemical safety.

August 27, 2015

Center Co-director Clegg and colleagues contributed to a study that showed different levels of immune rejection of cells derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in mice with a humanized immune system. Whereas autologous iPSC-smooth muscle cells were very immunogenic, retinal pigmented epithelial (RPE) cells were immune tolerated even when transplanted into locations outside the eye. The work provides hope for the development of human stem cell therapies to treat macular degeneration, a major cause of blindness and visual impairment in older adults. An estimated 30 million to 50 million people worldwide are affected by the degenerative medical condition. iPSC-RPE are being developed for therapies by the Clegg lab in work funded by the Foundation Fighting Blindness.

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