Harvard Medical School researchers have successfully reversed age-related vision loss in animals, as well as eye damage stemming from a condition mimicking human glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness around the world.
The achievement represents the first successful attempt to reverse glaucoma-induced vision loss.
The team said the approach could pave the way for therapies to promote tissue repair across various organs and reverse ageing and age-related diseases in humans.
The treatment had multiple beneficial effects on the eye such as:
- Promoting nerve regeneration in mice with damaged optic nerves
- Reversing vision loss in animals with a condition mimicking glaucoma
- Reversed vision loss in ageing animals without glaucoma.
The team’s approach is based on a theory about why we age, hypothesising that if DNA methylation (a process by which methyl groups are tacked onto DNA) does control ageing, then erasing some of its footprints might reverse the age of cells inside living organisms and restore them to their earlier, more youthful state.
Later studies, however, showed two important setbacks. First, when used in adult mice, the foundation of the treatment could also induce tumour growth, rendering the approach unsafe. Second, the factors could reset the cellular state to the most primitive cell state, thus completely erasing a cell’s identity.
Nonetheless, researchers said if their findings are confirmed in further animal work, they could initiate clinical trials within two years to test the efficacy of the approach in people with glaucoma.
