For their work published in Cell 2020 (Cell Types of the Human Retina and Its Organoids at Single-Cell Resolution), Magdalena Renner and Cameron Cowan have received the Swiss OphthAward 2021.
They succeeded in growing accurate replicas of human retinas. This achievement will accelerate the development of new therapies for eye diseases.
Important step to meet high medical need
There is a fundamental unmet need to develop model retinas that closely resemble the real human organ, which would open up the possibility of developing treatments in a dish tailored to individual patients. No functional human retinas had ever been recovered before. “We therefore developed a method to preserve eye tissue with minimal oxygen deprivation, and demonstrated for the first time a human retina with intact responses to light post mortem. The retinal organoids, like the human retina, have a layered structure and they react in the same way to light," explains Cameron Cowan, Head of the IOB Scientific Computing Platform.
Treatments tailored to individual patients
A comparison of organoids with retinas from multi-organ donors confirmed the strong similarities. “After 38 weeks in culture, the duration of a typical human pregnancy, our organoids contain many of the same cell types as an adult human retina,” says Magdalena Renner, Head of the IOB Human Organoid Platform.
The researchers showed the high value of organoids for therapy development by demonstrating that retinal diseases map to the same sorts of cells in the organoids and real retinas. "We can grow retinal organoids from a patient’s blood or skin samples and use those to develop treatments in the laboratory that are tailored to that individual patient,” Magdalena Renner explains.