NASA completes first part of Webb Telescope's MIRI Instrument

Much like the inside of an operating room, in the clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, engineers worked meticulously to implant part of the eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope.

They scrubbed up and suited up to perform one of the most delicate performances of their lives. 

That part of the eyes, the MIRI, or Mid-Infrared Instrument, will glimpse the formation of galaxies and see deeper into the universe than ever before. 

Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn

Much like the inside of an operating room, in the clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., engineers worked meticulously to implant part of the eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope.



They scrubbed up and suited up to perform one of the most delicate performances of their lives. That part of the eyes, the MIRI, or Mid-Infrared Instrument, will glimpse the formation of galaxies and see deeper into the universe than ever before.

It's high-stakes surgery that has taken years of preparation. This science instrument must fit precisely into the ISIM, or Integrated Science Instrument Module (the black frame on the right to which they install the MIRI), so that it is installed exactly where it needs to be within the width of a thin human hair.



This intricate process involves a tremendous amount of work from the engineering team to make sure the instrument is settled and installed just right.

The MIRI itself weighs 181 pounds (82 kg) and is being held by a crane (on the left of the photo), which is being maneuvered by the engineer at the base of the ladder.

Each engineer has a role in the process that must be done as delicately as possible so as not to disturb anything, said Jason Hylan, the engineer responsible for the operation from start to finish.

Disturbing MIRI would cost the mission the critical science that will help shape our knowledge of the universe, and push the boundaries of scientific discoveries.

For that reason, precise engineering is key and that can put some of the engineers in awkward positions, literally.

"Because we are trying to put so much stuff into such a small space, we always run into problems related to access," Hylan said. "This is somewhat akin to working on a car under the hood – some things are easy to get to because they are on the outside of where you are working."

"Other parts are buried and are very difficult to get to. Much of what we have to integrate is on the 'inside' and so access is very difficult. "

"During the operation, we need to access multiple things at the same time and one person may only be able to access one area, so we need multiple people all around doing the same thing at the same time. It is a very coordinated operation."

Hylan said that, like watching the new World Trade Center being built in New York right now, the process is tedious, but the end result is something significant that will leave its mark on a generation.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the successor to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

It will be the most powerful space telescope ever built and observe the most distant objects in the universe, provide images of the first galaxies formed and see unexplored planets around distant stars.

The Webb telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

Nature: Biologists grow human-eye precursor from stem cells

A stem-cell biologist has had an eye-opening success in his latest effort to mimic mammalian organ development in vitro.

Yoshiki Sasai of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CBD) in Kobe, Japan, has grown the precursor of a human eye in the lab.

The structure, called an optic cup, is 550 micrometres in diameter and contains multiple layers of retinal cells including photoreceptors.

The achievement has raised hopes that doctors may one day be able to repair damaged eyes in the clinic.

But for researchers at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Yokohama, Japan, where Sasai presented the findings this week, the most exciting thing is that the optic cup developed its structure without guidance from Sasai and his team.

The human eye is a complex structure — but the cues to build it come from inside the growing cells. Credit: Dougal Waters/Getty

“The morphology is the truly extraordinary thing,” says Austin Smith, director of the Centre for Stem Cell Research at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Until recently, stem-cell biologists had been able to grow embryonic stem-cells only into two-dimensional sheets. But over the past four years, Sasai has used mouse embryonic stem cells to grow well-organized, three-dimensional cerebral-cortex¹, pituitary-gland² and optic-cup³ tissue. His latest result marks the first time that anyone has managed a similar feat using human cells.

Read the full article here: Biologists grow human-eye precursor from stem cells : Nature

NASA Research: Long duration space missions 'may damage eyesight'

The eyes and brains of astronauts who have spent long periods of time in orbit can develop abnormalities, new research has suggested.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on 27 spacefarers found effects similar to those that can occur in intracranial hypertension, which results in a build up of pressure within the skull.

The concern would be that astronauts could suffer eyesight problems.

The study is reported in the Journal of Radiology.

It was led by Larry Kramer, a professor of diagnostic and interventional imaging at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

His team examined astronauts who had spent more than 30 days of cumulative time in the weightless environment of space.

The group found evidence for expansion of the cerebral spinal fluid space surrounding the optic nerve of nine of the astronauts, a flattening of the rear of the eyeball in six, a bulging of the optic nerve in four, and changes in the pituitary gland and its connection to the brain in three individuals.

The pituitary gland secretes and stores hormones that regulate a variety of important body functions.

The health of astronauts is very carefully monitored. Living in weightless conditions for extended periods can result in a loss of bone density and in muscle wastage.

There are also dangers associated with radiation coming from the Sun.

It is partly for these reasons that stays on the International Space Station (ISS) are restricted to six months.

If missions to Mars were ever conducted, the period of travel to and from the planet would likely take over a year.

US space agency (Nasa) medical staff said they were looking into the latest concerns, but that the scale of abnormalities observed did not have them unduly worried at this stage.

William Tarver, the chief of flight medicine clinic at Nasa's Johnson Space Center, said the results were suspicious but not conclusive of intracranial hypertension.

"Nasa has placed this problem high on its list of human risks, has initiated a comprehensive programme to study its mechanisms and implications, and will continue to closely monitor the situation," he said.

First Patients Shown to Improve With Embryonic Stem Cells

Before treatment, the 51-year-old graphic artist was legally blind, unable to read a single letter on a standard eye chart.

She has suffering from Stargardt's disease, the most common form of macular degeneration in young patients, since she was a teenager, and it was getting progressively worse.

A second patient, aged 78, suffered from dry macular degeneration -- the leading cause of blindness in the elderly -- and could not even see well enough to go shopping.

But after being treated with stem cells from a donated human embryo, both women have improved dramatically, researchers said on Monday.

Stem cells are master cells that can differentiate into any of the 200 kinds of cells in the human body.

Their results are the first-ever report of the medical use of stem cells taken from human embryos, making them crucial barometers of whether the controversial technique will ever find widespread therapeutic uses.

In a paper published online in The Lancet on Monday, physicians at the University of California, Los Angeles, and scientists at biotechnology company Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) report that the first two patients in the clinical trial suffered no adverse health effects from the treatment and seem to have benefited from it.

A week after having cells derived from a days-old embryo injected into her eye, the graphic artist could count fingers, and after one month she could read the top five letters on the eye chart.

She can see more color and contrast, has started using her computer, and for the first time in years can read her watch and thread a needle. The macular degeneration patient recently went to the mall for the first time in years.

The safety findings, not any vision improvement, is what people should focus on, said Dusko Ilic, senior lecturer in stem cell science at Kings College London, who was not involved in the work.

"If everyone expects that the blind patients will see after being treated ... it will end up as disaster," he said.

Nevertheless, advocates for the blind are already hailing the results. "At last we are seeing fruits of human embryonic stem cell research entering clinical trials," said Peter Coffey, Director of the London Project to Cure Blindness.

OBJECTIONS AND RISKS
Using human embryonic stem cells for research or treatment has incited controversy for ethical and medical reasons. Some opponents argue that because removing stem cells from days-old human embryos almost always destroys the embryo, the technique amounts to murder.

ACT is the only company currently testing human embryonic stem cells in study patients. Last November, stem-cell pioneer Geron announced that it was halting what had been the first-ever clinical trial of the cells-testing them in patients with spinal cord injuries - and leaving the field.

When Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of ACT, approached ophthalmic surgeon Steven Schwartz of UCLA about leading the clinical trial, Schwartz asked for ethical advice from two of his patients: elderly nuns. They gave him the go-ahead, he said last year.

Even scientists who support stem cell research argue that they could be dangerous to use therapeutically. The very property that makes them so valuable in research - stem cells can morph into any of the kinds of cells in the human body - also makes them risky.

They can form teratomas, a type of tumor that arises when stem cells differentiate into a profusion of cell types.

Another concern is that transplanting cells derived from human embryos could be rejected by the patient's immune system. The ACT team got around that by targeting the eye, which is an "immuno-privileged" site that does not produce a strong immune response to foreign tissue.

In the study, physicians led by Schwartz injected what are called retinal epithelial cells into one eye of each patient.

RPE cells lie at the back of the eye and bathe the retina's rods and cones in substances called growth factors. When RPE cells die, as they do in macular degeneration, so do the photoreceptors, eventually causing blindness.

Transplanting RPE cells grown from stem cells, Lanza reasoned when he began this research almost a decade ago, might rejuvenate the eye's rods and cones, restoring lost vision.

To produce RPE cells, Lanza and his colleagues arranged to obtain days-old embryos created by in vitro fertilization.

The parents, who no longer wanted the embryos, donated them for research. The scientists then removed a single stem cell from one embryo, grew it in the lab to obtain millions of cells, and differentiated them into RPE cells.

The primary purpose of the clinical trial was to determine whether the implanted cells caused any harm. So far, neither patient has experienced inflammation, an indication that their immune system is not attacking the foreign cells.

And there is no evidence that a teratoma formed in either patient. Researchers also found that the RPE cells still survive after being implanted four months ago.

NOT A CURE FOR THE BLIND
The goal of the study was to determine safety and, at most, see whether the therapy can slow down or arrest vision loss, not restore it. "The fact that we're seeing measurable improvements in their vision, persisting for more than four months, is a bonus," Lanza said in an interview.

Although rods and cones cannot be brought back from the dead, he explains, "until you lose them completely you can rescue them." He believes that the transplanted RPE cells both bathed the deteriorating rods and cones in nourishing growth factors and gobbled up fragments of dead rods and cones, keeping the retinal environment healthier for the survivors.

The UCLA physicians plan to enroll a total of 12 Stargardt's patients and 12 macular degeneration patients in the ongoing clinical trial, with groups of three patients each receiving a different number of retinal epithelial cells.

The two patients being reported on Monday each received the smallest dose, 50,000 cells. Other patients will receive at least twice that many. The trial is also expanding across the Atlantic: the first patient was treated at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London last Friday. In a later trial, they hope to treat patients with earlier-stage disease, before so much of their vision has been lost.

David Prentice of the Family Research Council, a pro-life group that has opposed the use of human embryos for research, says the results will require more scrutiny.

"You have to follow the patients longer to know if it's safe," he told Reuters. "People will also want to know if there are other routes to the same end," using sources of stem cells other than human embryos.

Lanza is planning just that. He believes that skin cells "re-programmed" to revert to embryonic status might prove just as good a source or RPE and other specialized cells as human embryonic stem cells.

Called IPS (for "induced pluripotent stem") cells, they can be derived from a patient's own skin cells and pose no risk of immune rejection.

"I think we can be up and running in the clinic with IPS cells in one or two years," Lanza says.

First human trials for stem cell blindness therapy

The pioneering treatment could help people losing their sight due to Stargardt, a currently untreatable disease that is one of the most common forms of youth blindness

Photo: GETTY

The first human trials of a stem cell therapy for an eye disease that causes blindness in young people could start next year (2010).

The pioneering treatment could help people losing their sight due to Stargardt, a currently untreatable disease that is one of the most common forms of youth blindness.

Studies on rats and mice have found that the therapy prevents further vision loss without adverse side effects, and the firm behind the breakthrough has now applied to US authorities to test it on humans.

The treatment would consist of a single injection of retinal cells derived from embryonic stem cells left over from IVF treatment.

"After years of research and political debate, we're finally on the verge of showing the potential clinical value of embryonic stem cells," said Robert Lanza, the chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology, the firm which developed the therapy. "The field desperately needs a big clinical success."

The trials would involve 12 Stargardt patients currently losing their sight, and could begin early in 2010 if the Food and Drug Administration grants approval.

Embryonic stem cell research has been controversial because human embryos are destroyed in order to obtain the cells capable of developing into almost every tissue of the body but it also holds great promise for treating cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's and other diseases.