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Tai-Chi Lin [1; 2; 3; 4] and Magdalene J. Seiler [5; 6] and Danhong Zhu [1; 7] and Paulo Falabella [1] and David R. Hinton [1; 7] and Dennis O. Clegg [8] and Mark S. Humayun [1; 2] and Biju B. Thomas [1; 2]
Academic Editor: Tilo Kunath
1, Department of Ophthalmology, USC Roski Eye Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, usc.edu
2, USC Institute for Biomedical Therapeutics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, usc.edu
3, Department of Ophthalmology, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan, nymu-e.web.ym.edu.tw
4, Institute of Clinical Medicine, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan, nymu-e.web.ym.edu.tw
5, Stem Cell Research Center, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA, ucla.edu
6, Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA, ucla.edu
7, Department of Pathology, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, usc.edu
8, Center for Stem Cell Biology and Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, berkeley.edu
Received Apr 15, 2017; Accepted Jun 19, 2017
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Stem cell-based therapies have shown to restore or rescue visual function in preclinical models of retinal degenerative diseases [1–5] which are built on previous data with transplantation of fetal retinal tissue sheets. This has set a standard what these optimal cells can do [6–9]. Although retinal degenerative diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa (RP), age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and Stargardt’s disease differ in their causes and demographics, all of them cause RPE and/or photoreceptor destruction which can lead to blindness [1–5]. Currently, there is no clinically accepted cure for irreversible dysfunction or death of photoreceptors and RPE. Since the retina, like other central nervous system tissue, has little regenerative potential [4, 10], stem cell-based therapies that aimed to replace the dysfunctional or dead cells remain a major hope.
In 1959, a rat fetal retina was transplanted into the anterior chamber of a pregnant rat’s eye [11]. Several decades later, dissociated retinal cells or cell aggregates were transplanted into the subretinal space of rats [12–17]. In the 80s, Dr. Gouras demonstrated transplantation of cultured human...