The Retina Blueprint

Why is AMD – the most common cause of blindness – still without any effective treatment? There are various reasons, but a significant issue is the lack of an effective research platform in drug development that drives translation from bench to bedside.

Boot camp blues

Before entering the clinical stages of research, drug candidates (recruits) must pass boot camp – more formally known as in vitro and animal testing. Unfortunately, traditional cell culture and animal experiments do not reflect the exact condition of human organs, which causes many recruits to drop out of the pipeline.

Our aim is to improve the process by making a human tissue testing platform. By being able to more accurately mimic function in a living and breathing human, several serious problems could be resolved.

Our approach is to use a combination of decellularized extracellular matrix (dECM) and 3D cell printing technology to better create a working human model in the lab (1). The dECM – a hydrogel rich in extracellular matrix components from the actual tissue – acts as a “bioink” when mixed with the cells – enabling superior cell maturation compared with conventional bioink. Furthermore, the latest 3D cell printing technology facilitates the fabrication of complex and functional multicellular tissue structures.

We have expertise in both of these technologies. Recently, we developed the retina dECM (RdECM) bioink, and printed a retina using 3D cell printing technology. In cultured retinas, cells not only proliferate well, but also express retinal-related markers that were not shown in previous in vitro studies. Our aim is to use the platform for drug development to treat AMD (and eventually other diseases), ultimately helping blind patients around the world.

Impact on the visual field

So where does our developed retina lead us? Functional retinas are in demand not only for development and testing of new drugs but also for transplantation – and our 3D printed retina could be used in both cases. 

But we don’t want to stop developing the model. We have plans to improve upon our retina tissue model by introducing other components of the eye, including the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) and choroid. The integration of more components makes the tissue more complex, bringing it yet another step closer to the healthy functioning retinas that most of us are lucky to have – and thus producing even better tissue for transplantation and drug testing.