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."
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