Swollen eye is setback for blindness treatment using stem cells

retina, macula, fovea and related structures

Cultura Creative/Alamy

A man has developed serious swelling in his eye after receiving a pioneering stem cell treatment for blindness, but this was probably the result of the surgery itself rather than the stem cell implant.

The treatment was developed by Masayo Takahashi of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, and her team. Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells produced from a person’s own skin cells or a tissue-matched donor are turned into a patch of eye cells ready for transplant. The recipient is someone with a progressive form of blindness called age-related macular degeneration.

In 2014,

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