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

Google glasses: Streaming info to your eyeballs

When smartphones came out, it seemed like a leap in convenience to be able to carry important information on us at all times, instead of leaving it with our computers.

But soon, it may seem onerous to reach for your phone, turn it on and find the right app to get a piece of information, when you could instead just wear a pair of glasses that directly stream information to your eyeballs.

By year’s end, Google is set to release glasses that do exactly that in real time, so you won’t constantly have to reach into your purse or pocket.

The glasses, which will be Android-based, will cost about as much as a smartphone ($250-$600) and feature a 3G or 4G data connection and GPS and motion sensors and, of course, they’ll sport a screen a few inches away from the eye.

Here are some other key features:

• A unique navigation system that scrolls and clicks with a tilt of the head: Seth Weintraub, a 9 to 5 Google blogger who broke the story says, “We are told it is very quick to learn and once the user is adept at navigation, it becomes second nature and almost indistinguishable to outside users.”
• A low-resolution built-in camera: It will monitor the world in real time and overlay relevant information about the location, nearby buildings and friends who happen to be in the area.
• The ability to send data to the cloud: Then, the wearer can tap into services such as Google Latitude to share his/her location, Google Goggles to search images and figure out what he/she is looking at, Google Maps to find out what else is nearby, and to check in to places.

They’ll look like Oakley Thumps (pictured above), and Google expects that users won’t wear them all the time but only when they want the augmented reality view.

The glasses are being developed at the Google X offices, a secret lab that works on futuristic projects such as robots and space elevators.

"Internally, the Google X team has been actively discussing the privacy implications of the glasses and the company wants to ensure that people know if they are being recorded by someone wearing a pair of glasses with a built-in camera."

For now, Google isn’t yet thinking about developing business models from the glasses, but will wait to see if the glasses take off first.

Meanwhile, Apple is also reportedly working on wearable computing, the inform of a computer that straps around the wrist.

Meanwhile, Google is said to be building a $120 million electronics facility for testing “precision optical technology.”

Seeing Things That Aren’t There? Charles Bonnet Syndrome

One woman saw a fully dressed Royal Canadian mountie in her living room. Another saw the same red brick building in every part of town, as well as in the country. One man saw monkeys with red hats and blue coats playing in his yard.

They were all experiencing Charles Bonnet (“bo-nay”) Syndrome.

“Do you ever see something you know is not there, but it looks real?” It’s a question that Lylas G. Mogk, M.D., and Raman Deol, O.D., of the Henry Ford Center for Vision Rehabilitation and Research in metropolitan Detroit, always ask their low-vision patients.

Low vision that cannot be improved through corrective lenses or surgery can be the result of macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetes, stroke, or other causes.

Some of their patients respond that they see purple flowers everywhere, even in winter. Others see animals, people, buildings, or geometric, quilt-like patterns. They rarely share their experience with their families, for fear of being misunderstood. Some wonder whether the visions suggest early dementia.

In 1789, Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet described the visions of his father-in-law, who had low vision and saw people, animals and other objects that he knew were not real.

Bonnet himself experienced phantom visions later in his life, similar to those of his father-in-law. Bonnet’s discovery went largely unnoticed for 150 years until the 1930s, when doctors rediscovered his files and named the syndrome after him.

The frequently undiagnosed Charles Bonnet Syndrome is very common, affecting 20 – 30 percent of those with low vision. Some may experience it for a few months, others for several years.

The images can occur daily or only occasionally, with the same image appearing to the same person. There is no cure, but most people are not bothered by the images, and many find them interesting or amusing, especially once they understand it’s just their eyes playing tricks on them.

Although the cause is not known, the images can be compared to the “phantom pain” that can be felt by people who have had a limb amputated.

The nerves that were connected to the missing limb still send signals to the brain. In our visual system, the nerves no longer receiving visual messages can cause the brain to “see” realistic images, while recognizing they are not real.

Many physicians are not yet aware of Charles Bonnet Syndrome, and may mistake it for psychotic hallucinations. Patients with the syndrome have been misdiagnosed and prescribed anti-psychotic medications.

To identify Charles Bonnet Syndrome, ophthalmologists use these criteria:
• The person has low vision.
• The images occur when the person is conscious, with open eyes.
• The person recognizes the images are not real.
• The same image appears repeatedly, superimposed on the real world. For example, the person sees a room normally, but the wall appears to have flowers on it and only that same image of flowers recurs to that same person.
• Images are only visual; they may move, but there are no sounds or smells. It’s like seeing a picture, or watching a silent movie.
• Images are common, familiar objects. They may be amusing or mildly annoying, but not frightening.
People with low vision who believe they may be experiencing Charles Bonnet Syndrome should discuss it with their ophthalmologist.

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.

Playing Outdoors Helps Children see further

A new analysis of recent eye health studies shows that more time spent outdoors is related to reduced rates of nearsightedness, also known as myopia, in children and adolescents.

Myopia is much more common today in the United States and many other countries than it was in the 1970s. In parts of Asia, more than 80 percent of the population is nearsighted.

The analysis suggests that more exposure to natural light and/or time spent looking at distant objects may be key factors.

The analysis was led by Dr. Justin Sherwin of the University of Cambridge.

The data included in the analysis was drawn from eight carefully selected studies on outdoor time and myopia in children and adolescents, representing 10,400 participants in total.

Dr. Sherwin’s team concluded that for each additional hour spent outdoors per week, the chance of myopia dropped by approximately two percent.

Nearsighted children spent on average 3.7 fewer hours per week outdoors than those who either had normal vision or were farsighted.

Though the reasons aren’t yet clear, the protective effect appears to result from simply being outdoors rather than performing a specific activity.

Two of the eight studies examined whether children who spent more time outdoors were also those who spent less time performing near work, such as playing computer games or studying, but no such relationship was found in either study.

The amount of time spent on near work is of interest to researchers as another potential cause for the recent uptick in nearsightedness.

“Increasing children’s outdoor time could be a simple and cost-effective measure with important benefits for their vision and general health” said Dr. Khawaja.

“If we want to make clear recommendations, however, we’ll need more precise data. Future, prospective studies will help us understand which factors, such as increased use of distance vision, reduced use of near vision, natural ultra violet light exposure or physical activity, are most important.”

ESO VLT looks into the eyes of the Virgin

Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope, at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Cerro Paranal facility in Chile, announce that they were recently able to capture a remarkable new image of a galactic duo called The Eyes.

Another reason why this image is very important is that it's the first-ever to be created through the ESO Cosmic Gems program, a public outreach initiative, meant to get more people involved with the field of astronomy.

As the name suggests, the program will mostly focus on either known or extremely interesting cosmic features that have something special over other objects or structures in their respective classes. ESO hopes that this will make more students interested in what's going on in space.

To that end, imaging this beautiful, yet peculiar pair of galaxies appeared to be the logical thing to do. NGC 4438, the larger galaxy in the system, did not always look like this. In fact, hundreds of millions of years ago, it was a majestic spiral galaxies.

Repeated collisions with surrounding dwarf galaxies eventually ripped its beautiful structure apart, leaving only this stained formation behind. However, the past events made the galaxy look like the pair of NGC 4435, its companion.

When viewed through a moderate-sized telescope, both galaxies appear as a bright set of eyes in the constellation of Virgo (the Virgin). The galaxies themselves are an estimated 100,000 light-years apart from each other, a distance smaller than the diameter of the Milky Way.

The interacting structures are located an estimated 50 million light-years away from Earth, which is relatively close in cosmic terms. This is also the reason why they can be effortlessly observed with a moderate-sized telescope on a dark night.

Interestingly, the cores of NGC 4438 and NGC 4435 look similar, but their edges couldn't be more different. While the former still contains vast amounts of cosmic dust and hydrogen gas, the smaller one is literally devoid of such materials, which implies it no longer forms blue stars.

“Some astronomers believe that the damage caused to NGC 4438 resulted from an approach between the two galaxies to within about 16 000 light-years that happened some 100 million years ago,” an ESO press release accompanying the findings expalins.

“But while the larger galaxy was damaged, the smaller one was significantly more affected by the collision. Gravitational tides from this clash are probably responsible for ripping away the contents of NGC 4438, and for reducing NGC 4435’s mass and removing most of its gas and dust,” they add.

“Another possibility is that the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 86, further away from The Eyes and not visible in this image, was responsible for the damage caused to NGC 4438,” the team concludes.

Scottish Researcher Maps Human Eye's Neural Network

The world around you might look really pretty and colorful, but just how we perceive that color hasn’t always been so clear.

The moment the light hits your eyes from the sun, cells in your retina can transmit the signals to your brain.

Curious to examine the circuitry behind the the neural network, researchers mapped color vision with a recording device.

The retina is made of a layer of neural tissue with input cells, processing cells and output cells. Its input cells (photoreceptors) can take in light and distinguish the wavelength in such a way we can see in color.

University of Glasgow created a 519-electrode array to record the speedy neural signals in great spacial detail, the news release said.

By measuring the retinal output signals of hundreds of thousands of cells, it was clear how the types of cells in the retina created a color image.

The breakthrough study showed how the cells receive light and transmit that information to the brain. The study was published in the journal Nature. For the first time, the scientists saw how cone receptor cells are connected to the ganglion cells.

The Glasgow researcher, Keith Mathieson, now at the University of California Santa Cruz and Stanford University said, “To develop new therapies for vision-related problems it is necessary to fully understand how the retina works. This research gives us a much greater insight into the circuitry of the retina and is an important development for neuroscience.”

Leading cause of blindness identified - Age-related macular degeneration (AMD)

The mechanism behind a leading cause of blindness has been discovered, which could result in new treatments for a disease that causes 50 per cent of all blindness in the western world.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is caused by damage to the macula – part of the retina at the back of the eye – and is thought to be linked to alterations in the gene resonsible for CFH, a protein involved in the body's immune response.

To work out how this might cause AMD, Paul Bishop at the University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues applied normal and diseased forms of CFH to macula obtained from donated eyes. Abnormal CFH seemed unable to bind to the macula, probably as a result of not being able to bind to two specific carbohydrates.

If there is not enough functional CFH bound to the macula, the immune system does not recognise the tissue as its own and so will attack it, says Bishop. "Now that we know the mechanism, we can think about treatments, such as injecting CHF into the bloodstream."

US Scientist eyes 39-day voyage to Mars

A journey from Earth to Mars could in the future take just 39 days -- cutting current travel time nearly six times -- according to a rocket scientist who has the ear of the US space agency.

Franklin Chang-Diaz, a former astronaut and a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says reaching the Red Planet could be dramatically quicker using his high-tech VASIMR rocket, now on track for liftoff after decades of development.

The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket -- to give its full name -- is quick becoming a centerpiece of NASA's future strategy as it looks to private firms to help meet the astronomical costs of space exploration.

NASA, still reeling from a political decision to cancel its Constellation program that would have returned a human to the moon by the end of the decade, has called on firms to provide new technology to power rovers or even future manned missions.

Hopes are now pinned on firms like Chang-Diaz's Texas-based Ad Astra Rocket Company.

"In the early days... NASA support for the project was rather minimal because the agency did not emphasize advanced technologies as much as it's doing now," Chang-Diaz told AFP.

NASA was focused instead on the series of Apollo missions that delivered men to the moon for the first, and so far last, times.

"They were mesmerized by the Apollo days and lived in the Apollo era for 40 years, and they just forgot developing something new," he said.

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