Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-Based Cell Therapy of the Retina

Abstract

This review outlines the progress and current knowledge of stem cell-based treatments for the retina. Basic research, which began as a study of neural stem cells in the 1980s, is now being applied for the clinical use of embryonic stem (ES) cells and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The author's group had transplanted iPS cell-derived retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cell sheets to the eye of a patient with exudative age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in 2014 as a clinical research. Since it was the first clinical study using iPS cell-derived cells, the safety and tumorigenicity of iPSCs products were especially a great concern. At 1 year after surgery, the transplanted sheet remained intact, and no serious adverse event including tumor formation had been observed.