Dresden International Graduate School for Biomedicine and Bioengineering

© CRTD

Within the last decade the field of retinal research, in particular the development of therapeutic strategies to treat visual impairment and blindness, made significant improvements. The relative easy accessibility of the retina and the increasing knowledge about its architecture and function has made the retina to one of the best studied parts of the CNS, which consequently also entailed major developments towards therapeutic interventions, such as retinal prosthesis, pharmacological, gene therapeutic or cell-based strategies. These approaches provided first evidence that visual function can in principle be restored in retinal degenerative diseases caused by photoreceptor or retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) loss. Conceptually, replacement of photoreceptors/RPE via cell transplantation represents a highly attractive treatment option, as restoration of the native light-processing pathways might most closely resemble normal visual perception. Although diverse cell populations have been used for transplantation experiments into the retina for more than two decades, in depth analysis of the specific molecular requirements of donor cells as well as the host tissue for functional repair have just recently been initiated. Within our lab the requirements for successful photoreceptor or RPE replacement are studied in mouse models of retinal degeneration with the aim to treat visual impairment and blindness.