Stem cell therapy trial reverses "irreversible" damage to cornea
45 comments
·March 9, 2025nashashmi
aetherson
Note here that "complete success" doesn't seem to necessarily mean recovery of vision, just some kinds of testing of corneal health. The article vaguely says that "most" patients had some improvement of vision. I couldn't quickly find discussion of this in the actual study, but the study claims success in proving safety and suggests further investigation is necessary to show therapeutic efficacy.
Chance-Device
This is an important point. It looks like they didn’t directly make any measurements of vision, just biological markers of corneal health.
That doesn’t mean that vision didn’t improve. It’s just a bit odd that if it did, they wouldn’t have quantified it and added that to this paper.
momento
If you read the article, they clearly test vision in the patients.
>the majority of patients regained some sight, with some advancing from legally blind to low vision.
bluechair
Not for the faint of heart but look at figure 3 of the original paper: * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56461-1
Amazing!
yapyap
Although I understand it doesn’t mean this is even nearly useable for a real thing rn, that’s fucking dope.
wtk
My mom is 76 and she had a virus ruin one of corneas. I wish this was already a common practice but I doubt she will be able to benefit from this.
If your eye is irritated and redness doesn't go away for days - visit your doctor.
iknowstuff
Whoa thats wild. Did they identify the virus?
underlipton
Tangentially-related: the recurrent corneal erosion that I've been managing (painfully and unsuccessfully) for a decade has finally seen some measure of remission after I started self-treating with Fingerprick Autologous Blood. It's what it says on the tin: I use a blood testing fingerprick to draw a few drops of blood, which I insert under my eyelid. Blink. Done. Not even a month and half with a bandage contact lens helped as much. It's a little frustrating that years of dealing with far-flung ophthalmologists and expensive eye ointments that make things worse (Muro 128 costs more than printer ink) could have been preempted with a application of a substance that's already inside me.
iknowstuff
Damn that’s metal as fuck.
null
javiramos
Can’t comment on the technical quality of this paper but wanted to highlight that the research was funded by the NIH which our government is currently chaotically gutting.
Link to paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56461-1.pdf
AnthonBerg
Thank you!
dpatru
[flagged]
0x70dd
You should take everything he says with a grain of salt. He’s defunding research on transgenic mice, not transgender.
bhk
Where did this bogus "transgenic" narrative come from? And BTW he didn't say "research on transgender mice", he said "making mice transgender"... which is technically incorrect but obvious to me (and, I thought, anyone knowledgeable in the field) that the research involved giving mice hormone therapy.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/04/politics/fact-check-trump-add...
gryfft
[flagged]
brookst
The president embarrassed himself by mistaking “transgenic” for “transgender”, and a good segment of the population further embarrassed themselves by embracing confirmation bias rather than stopping to think “wait, what can’t be right”.
op00to
Please refrain from posting deliberately misleading and inflammatory statements here.
The studies in question involve administering hormonal treatments to mice to investigate health outcomes relevant to humans, not altering the gender identity of mice.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tr...
yimby2001
Interesting times indeed https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-...
dpatru
The posted article was about research to cure blindness with stem cells. The top comment implied that such research was being defunded.
I asked for an example that was not about defunding research on transgender mice. The only examples provided were for research that was confused with transgender research.
So it seems that Doge is not cutting research for curing blindness and the like but only for transgender and some related-sounding other studies that were lumped in together, which will probably be sorted out in time.
Buttons840
They seem to be making broad cuts that will effect all research: https://apnews.com/article/trump-cuts-research-funding-nih-d...
tomrod
I believe you may be making your conclusion too early.
whileromeburns
It was good research, Duke was doing a study on optimizing the HIV vaccine in a high risk group—work that benefits us all: https://reason.com/2025/03/06/no-hhs-didnt-spend-8-million-m...
andrewl
The gen part of transgenic comes from genes, not gender.
Transgenic refers to an organism or cell whose genome has been altered by the introduction of one or more foreign DNA sequences from another species by artificial means.[1][2]
Trumps’s team grabbed the term to anger credulous people and get their support. Trump might not know what it means, but his team does, and they don’t care. I expect depatru knows what it means as well, or is capable of finding it out. But he’d rather add to the manipulation.
I’m linking to both genome.gov and to Wikipedia in case the government site is taken down.
[1]https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Transgenic [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgene
zoklet-enjoyer
Animal testing should be banned, so that's fine
erwiue
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fdfdsafa
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therealdkz
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fadreqrew
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> The new study … investigated a new treatment called cultivated autologous limbal epithelial cells (CALEC). This involves removing stem cells from a patient’s uninjured eye, growing their population in the lab for a few weeks, then surgically transplanting them into the injured eye.
14 patients tested. 79% reported healing in 12 months.