TOKYO: Japan has given the green light to the world’s first clinical trial using stem cells harvested from a patient’s own body, officials said yesterday, testing a treatment that may offer hope to millions of people robbed of their sight.
A government committee approved proposals for tests aimed at treating age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a common medical condition that causes blindness in older people, using “induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells,” a Health Ministry official said.
The trial treatment will try to create retinal cells that can be transplanted into the eyes of patients suffering from AMD, replacing the damaged part of the eye.
AMD, a condition that is incurable at present, affects mostly middle-aged and older people and can lead to blindness. It afflicts around 700,000 people in Japan alone.
Stem cell research is a pioneering field that has excited many in the scientific community with the potential they believe it offers.
Stem cells are infant cells that can develop into any part of the bodyUntil the discovery of iPS cells several years ago, the only way to obtain stem cells was to harvest them from human embryos.
Groundbreaking work done in 2006 by Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, a Nobel Laureate in medicine last year, succeeded in generating stem cells from adult skin tissue.
Like embryonic stem cells, iPS cells are also capable of developing into any cell in the body, but crucially their source material is readily available.
Japan OKs world’s 1st stem cell clinical trial
