Recent Results in Retinal Transplantation Give Hope for Restoring Vision

Transplanting sheets of fetal retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) together with its neuronal retina offers potential as a viable technique to prevent blindness and restore vision. This chapter presents results of the first promising FDA-approved clinical trial with a limited number of patients, bringing cautious optimism to the evaluation of the results. The basic research with several rodent degeneration models shows that transplants restore visually evoked responses in the brain, in an area of the superior colliculus corresponding to the placement of the transplant in the retina. Retinal transplants can preserve vision in an optokinetic acuity test. The mechanism of functional restoration is still unclear, but research results indicate that likely both synaptic connectivity between transplant and host and rescue of host photoreceptors are involved. The conclusion can be drawn that cotransplants of RPE together with retinal sheets have a beneficial functional effect in several animal retinal degeneration models as well as in patients in the recent clinical trial. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.