Blindness is a disease which affects millions of people around the world, and the problem is that we don’t have a certain cure for this. However, the science is advancing, scientists are trying to come up with techniques to cure blindness. The problem is that we know too little about this and that it’s possible that it won’t work on all patients. A team of scientists from the University of Washington have published a report in which they demonstrated that they can regenerate a specific type of neuron of a mammal’s inner retina.

The demonstration was made on mice and their cells in a retina, and the researchers managed to create new neurons after the retina was damaged. For the moment there aren’t any treatments for diseases like macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, but the researchers from University of Washington could change this forever.

“This is an excellent, clear demonstration that you can regrow cells of the inner retina,” said Stephen Rose, Chief Research Officer at the Foundation Fighting Blindness.

Located in the back of the eye, the retina consists of an outer layer of cells which detect light and convert it into electrical signals that are processed and sent to the brain by retina’s inner layers of cells. However, when the outer layer is damaged, it’s very likely that the inner layers to be damaged too, meaning that people lose their vision, so we need to find a way to prevent this.

“The outer retina is like the CPU, and the inner retina is like the motherboard. If I attach a new CPU to a dead motherboard, it won’t do any good, no matter how great a CPU it is,” added Rose.

The team of researchers was led by developmental biologist Thomas Reh, and they had to damage mice’s retinas with a powerful chemical which destroys the cells in the inner retina. After this, they injected dozens of proteins called growth factors which cause the muller glia cells “to return to an immature state.” These type of cells, muller glia, are responsible with providing nutrition to neurons and usually they don’t divide.

However, following this demonstration, a part of them returned to an immature state and then, some of them, regrew into mature neurons like amacrine cells which can be found in the inner retina. The amacrine cells are very important when it comes to motion detection and night vision, and although not all of them regrew, it’s a big step.

“We did not get a large number of new neurons. But we showed that we could make new amacrine cells, the cell type that had been lost to damage,” said Thomas Reh.

It’s very possible that the researchers were very lucky because it’s very hard for mammals to generate new neurons exactly where they are needed. We do not have self-healing capacities, but the work of the University of Washington scientists shows that under certain circumstances we could regrow mature neurons.

“We need much more control over the basic cellular processes before we can treat real people with blinding disease,” said Anand Swaroop from the National Eye Institute.

Still, there is a lot of work to be done as Rose continues: “It is hard enough to grow different cell types. But will they function? Will they do what the cells they are replacing normally would do? That’s really tough.”

We don’t know that yet, but it’s great start and Reh believes that we could also transplant cells in order to cure the retinas.

“Transplantation involves a tricky surgery; the cells may not go exactly where you want them to go. Developing methods to stimulate regeneration may prove to be the best option in the long run,” concluded Reh.