Research Projects

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which occurs due to the degeneration of Retinal Pigmented Epithelial cells (RPE) is the third most common cause of blindness. Currently there are no treatments to modify the progression of AMD, and the patient eventually becomes blind. Most effective way to treat this disease is to replace the damaged cells. In recent years pluripotent stem cell technology has evolved much and there is a great focus on using iPSC-derived RPE (iRPE) for therapy. Instead of generating iPSC and differentiating them to RPEfor each patient, a more economical and practical approach is the off-shelf availability of iRPE's of different homozygous HLA type (this will increase number of matching recipients). To achieve this a scalable method to bulk produce iRPE need to be developed. As the quality of iRPE can vary, a standard assay to estimate the quality of such cells also need to be developed. The proposed project aim to address these issues. Our proposed work will help to establish a robust scalable method to bulk produce functionally competent iRPE and to develop a simple tool to easily evaluate their quality. A method to generate iRPE cell sheet will also be established.