OSAKA/TOKYO Four Japanese institutions are set to break ground in stem cell medicine when they collaborate to treat patients suffering from a hard-to-cure eye disease known as age-related macular degeneration.
The project will see them transplant tissue grown from induced pluripotent stem cells taken from donors into the patients. What is new here is that the cost and time needed to transplant iPS-derived tissue will be significantly reduced by using stocked cells provided by donors instead of using the patients' own cells, as in a previous case involving a sufferer of the same disease.
