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New York, October 28 (IANS): Researchers have discovered a potential new strategy for treating eye diseases that affect millions of people around the world, often resulting in blindness.
Many serious eye diseases, including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and related retinal disorders, have abnormal overgrowth of new branches of the retinal blood vessels, which can lead to progressive vision loss.
It is a phenomenon called “neovascularization”.
For the past decade and a half, eye doctors have treated these conditions with drugs that block a protein, VEGF, responsible for stimulating the growth of new blood vessels.
Such drugs have improved the treatment of these conditions, but they don’t always work well and have potential safety concerns.
The current study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that a novel approach that does not directly target VEGF is highly effective in mice and has wider benefits than a standard VEGF blocking treatment.
“We were thrilled to see how well it worked in the animal model,” said study author Rebecca Berlow of the Scripps Research Institute in the US.
“There really is a need for another way to treat patients who do not respond well to anti-VEGF treatments,” Berlow added.
For the results, the research team conducted tests in a mouse model of retinal hypoxia and neovascularization, using a fragment of CITED2 that contains its functional elements of blocking the hypoxic response.
They showed that when a solution of the CITED2 fragment was injected into the eye, it lowered the activity of genes that are normally activated by HIF-1a in the cells of the retina and significantly reduced neovascularization.
Additionally, it did so by preserving, or allowing regrowth, healthy capillaries in the retina that would otherwise have been destroyed – the researchers call it “vaso-obliteration” – in this model of retinal disease.
In the same mouse model, the researchers tested a drug called aflibercept, a standard anti-VEGF treatment.
It helped reduce neovascularization, but did not prevent the destruction of the retinal capillaries.
However, reducing the dose of aflibercept and its combination with the CITED2 fragment produced better results than alone, strongly reducing neovascularization while preserving and restoring retinal capillaries.
CITED2’s ability to combine these two benefits appears to represent a key advance, the researchers concluded.
Researchers now hope to further develop the CITED2-based treatment, with the ultimate goal of testing it in human clinical trials.
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