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According to DEF’s medical director, Anthony Nesburn, MD, FACS, the approach of this project is unusual in its collaborative nature. There are 10 universities worldwide participating in the project with experts from multiple disciplines.

“The typical [research] approach is a traditional, academic approach, where a professor with a lab applies for NIH funding, gets it, and supports work in that lab,” says Henry Klassen, MD, PhD, the director of the Stem Cell and Retinal Regeneration Program in the Department of Ophthalmology at the UCI School of Medicine. “It’s a PI–centered approach. It slows things down, because the PI (principal investigator) has to develop the capacity to carry out the entire project, so it keeps the scope of the project smaller and relatively unambitious from a therapeutic translational perspective.”  

“We’re trying to speed things up by working on pigs. I don’t want to have to develop the farm, raise the pigs, and learn how to care for pigs. Who’s an expert at growing pig retinal progenitor cells in the lab, who’s a polymer chemist and can do retinal surgery on pigs? I’d guess there’s nobody who’d fit that description on the planet at the moment.” 

“The only way to move it ahead is to bring the people together who are already experts. It’s a much more collaborative approach. But the system isn’t really set up to deal with that. That’s why the flexibility of the DEF funding has been crucial to allow the distribution of funding across this international network to allow us the flexibility to bring expert retinal surgeons with experience in pig, together with Mike Young, PhD, of Harvard University’s Schepens Eye Research Institute and me — the only people who have grown retinal progenitor cells in the pig — and polymer chemists from MIT, Yale and UCSF all together in one project.”

The pig is the centerpiece of the project as rodents don’t necessarily translate to humans. “Animals do differ from each other,” Klassen says, “and, for better or worse, we’re a lot closer to pigs than we are to mice.” Work with pigs, however, can be difficult, time-consuming and expensive making collaboration imperative. In Denmark, Nesburn points out, pigs outnumber people and the Danish government helps support research work with pigs. While the FDA will not let researchers take experiments from rodents to humans, it will let them take them from pigs to humans. The hope, Nesburn and Klassen agree, is to move to clinical trials in humans in one to two years.

“Just putting stem cells alone into the eye probably won’t work to restore useful vision in situations where photoreceptors have already been lost to disease, such as with advanced AMD. For these situations, our goal is to identify the optimized stem cell and the optimized polymer, and put these both in the eye together with photoreceptor sheets as a composite implant” Klassen says.

Although there is a computer server at UCI that acts as a repository for researchers to securely share information, the group also believes in in-person meetings. “There are so many components: People doing surgery on pigs, people growing and analyzing cells, people making polymers, people analyzing the cells growing on the polymers, checking different cells and different polymer combinations and so on,” continued Klassen, “There was quite a bit of data after one year that we wanted to go over with each other.”

The project’s findings thus far are “startling,” Klassen says. “It opens up new ideas about what’s possible in terms of reconstructing the outer retina, which is exactly what we were hoping for. It was interesting to see people who had a lot of experience and years of frustration in this area see this data and just smile in amazement. That really shows you that it’s all coming together.”

The Pink Tank III lay presentation is available on videotape. Contact Susan Lee DeRemer at (310) 623-4499 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it