Transcript
Eugenio Derbes (0:00)
Hi, it's Eugenio Derbes. Did you know that with Boost Mobile, you can cut your phone bill in half this tax season? Yes, half. Buy six months of service and get six months free. That's a full year of service. Paying half. That sounds good, doesn't it? And all on the boost network with 99% nationwide coverage. Don't wait. Visit your Boost store today.
Dr. Samantha Amin (0:24)
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Dr. Robert Lillis (0:26)
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Dr. Samantha Amin (0:33)
Hello. Hello, curious crew. I'm Dr. Samantha Amin, also known as Science Sam, your new host for Curiosity Weekly from Discovery. I am thrilled we'll be learning together every week. I'm a neuroscientist by training and I've spent the better part of the last decade being completely obsessed with cells. So I'm really excited about today's episode. But don't worry. Together on Curiosity Weekly, we're going to explore all different areas of science. Like today, we're also going to this season we have a little more time to dig beyond the headlines of the latest scientific discoveries and talk to experts all to understand this fascinating world we live in. Oh, and of course, we'll cover things out of this world, too.
Dr. Robert Lillis (1:15)
Speaking of, Mars is a planet that was once a very different place than it is today. It had rivers and lakes and possibly oceans and a much thicker atmosphere. Like if you were to pour out a glass of water on Mars today, it would just boil away immediately because the pressure is so low that it's just not stable. So there must have been a lot more atmospheric pressure in the past on Mars for the water to have existed. So where did all that atmosphere go?
Dr. Samantha Amin (1:42)
That's Dr. Robert Lillis, a planetary scientist and head of NASA's Escapade mission. They're using twin spacecraft buds to study the atmosphere on Mars. This will help us prepare for future space travel to the red planet and give us answers to big questions about our own planet Earth. And then we'll learn about a new idea to make growing crops more efficient and bypass photosynthesis. But first, let's learn about a groundbreaking step for restoring vision. Researchers in Japan have successfully restored vision in patients with severe corneal damage using lab grown stem cells trying to see the road through a shattered windshield. That's how hard it can be seeing with a damaged cornea. Now imagine replacing that with a pristine sheet of lab grown tissue meticulously cultivated in a lab from stem cells and transplanted onto the eye to restore clarity and vision. This is exactly what researchers in Japan have achieved this innovative approach could revolutionize treatment for limbal stem cell deficiency. Now, corneal surgeries, they're fairly routine, but typically the tissue is donor tissue. So creating a sheet of corneal tissue in the lab and transplanting those cells in humans, that's pretty major. Can we geek out on some eye anatomy real quick just so we can get situated? If you look at your own eyes, you probably notice there's a black pupil and then there's a scrunched up iris surrounding it. That gives your eyes their color. Mine are brown. What's harder to see is that there's a thin, clear bit of tissue sitting in front of the iris and pupil, kind of like a windshield for the front of your eye. And it's called the cornea. The cornea protects our sensitive eye tissue and helps focus light so we can see. It's so important for vision that it actually has its own reservoir of stem cells to replenish it in case of minor damage. If you've ever scratched your eye, you know, like when you get a piece of dust in there and it feels uncomfortable, well, your cornea can get damaged, and it takes a few days to heal. It's those limbal stem cells that regenerate the cornea, and that's what takes a few days. Thank goodness for those limbal cells. Now, there's a condition where this doesn't happen. It's called limbal stem cell deficiency. You start to lose vision because these stem cells can't maintain your cornea. It's like a cracked windshield that worsens without repair. It can become hard to see and even more so with the buildup of scar tissue. Limbal stem cell deficiency can happen because of trauma to the eye, like a chemical or heat burn. It can be genetic or even a side effect of treatments like chemotherapy or radiation. The researchers behind this study wanted to find a new way to treat this condition. So four patients with later stages of this condition received a transplant of new cells grown entirely from lab made stem cells. The typical treatment involves removing the scar tissue from the cornea and transplanting healthy corneal tissue. I had to watch videos of this type of surgery in grad school, and whew, it's a lot. But I digress. If the limbal stem cell deficiency is only in one eye, the ophthalmologist can harvest healthy tissue from the other eye, which is great, really easy, compatible, love it. But there is a challenge if the patient has the stem cell deficiency in both eyes. In that case, they'll need to transplant healthy tissue from a Donor. Whether it's a living relative or organ donor, this can be really hard to source. Plus, like any transplant, there are risks involved. There's the possibility of rejection, infection, or complications from the surgery itself. So the researchers needed to figure out a way to solve this problem without requiring a donor transplant. That's where the researchers turned to an innovative solution using lab made stem cells to grow the transplant tissue in the lab. The lab made stem cells, they're called IPS cells, are very cool, but those already won a Nobel Prize back in 2012. What's new here? These folks have a special method to use them to basically model eye development in a dish. It's so cool. They use that to regrow the missing sheets of corneal cells. For the transplant. The team worked with four patients. They removed the scar tissue from each patient's eye, placed a sheet of their fancy corneal cells over the top, and capped it off with a protective contact lens for good measure. IPS cells have been used in a small number of clinical trials before, but this marks the first time induced pluripotent stem cells have been used to successfully treat corneal damage in humans. The eye is one of the areas of the body where I'm really optimistic about leaps in treatments in our lifetime. But don't expect this procedure to be widely available just yet. In medical research, scientists have to first evaluate how safe a treatment is before moving on to test its effectiveness. In this study, the team was focusing on safety, and the results showed that, yes, the procedure is safe and promising enough to proceed in tests with more people, but they're gonna need to conduct more studies with larger groups of patients. These labmate stem cells are also notoriously costly to grow at scale. And so that's a continued area of important research too. This sequential and thorough research is exactly what you want to see. No pun intended. There. There are a lot of stem cell scams out there, so please stay cautious. And like, I could talk stem cells all day because, fun fact, there's a whole separate group of stem cells in the back of our eyes where all the light sensitive rods and cones are. And I gotta shout this out because the lab where I did my PhD actually discovered them in adults. So love this topic and really excited to see this progress.