Brilio.net/en - What are you feeling about eye surgery? Anxious, scared... what if it doesnt work and we loose our sight forever?
No fear, folks! A new scientific study conducted in the US has found that a new, innovative medicine that can be dropped directly into the eye and can shrink, and in some cases, even cure cataracts.
As you may know, cataracts are the leading cause of blindness infecting tens of millions of the worlds population. To date, the only way to get rid of them is a painful and relatively expensive surgery. These new eye drops have yet to be tested on humans, but it would be in the next level of the study.
A molecular biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge Jonathan King said that This is a really comprehensive and compelling paperthe strongest Ive seen of its kind in a decade. King, even though not affiliated with the study, has been investigating cataract proteins since 2000.
So what are cataracts, really?
If you cant visualize cataracts, just imagine a soft, thin tissues forming in the eye lenses. It named crystallins; the major component of the fiber cells. But the unique properties of these cells mean that they are prone and vulnerable to damage, according to Jason Gestwicki, associate professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF.
Shortly after youre born, all the fiber cells in the eye lose the ability to make new proteins, or to discard old proteins, said Gestwicki, So the crystallins you have in your eye as an adult are the same as those youre born with.
These crystallins have to maintain the flexibility and transparency of fiber cells for our lenses to function properly. Proteins known as chaperones keep the crystallins soluble.
Unfortunately, its tricky to keep the crystallins healthy, because the clumped-together pathological configurations of crystallins are more stable than crystallins in healthy forms. These clumped-together proteins are called amyloids, which make it harder for light to pass through the lens by creating the cloudiness that we know as cataracts. Thus, the fiber-cell chaperones need to resist the tendency of crystallins to clump.
It remains unclear what exactly the cause of cataracts, but the majority of cases are related to age. The US National Eye Institute reported more than half of all Americans have a cataract or have had cataract surgery by the age of 80.
The story behind the research
The new eye drops are based on lanosterol. Its a naturally-occurring steroid, which researchers decided to investigate for its potential to cure cataracts after hearing of two children in China who had inherited a congenital form of cataract.
Their parents had not suffered from cataracts, but the children both had a mutation that prevented the production of lanosterol, which isnt found in their parents.
Considering the fact that the children did not produce lanosterol and got cataracts, while the parents were producing lanosterol and did not get cataracts, scientists thought that that the lanosterol could stop the defective crystalline proteins from clumping together and forming cataracts. This thought was to be applied in the non-congenital cases.
Then the research began...
The scientists used the lanosterol-based eye drops in three types of experiments. Firstly, the scientists worked with the human lens in the Laboratory. Secondly, they tested the effects on rabbits and finally they tested the eye drops on dogs with naturally occurring cataracts.
In the experiment with the human lens, there was a decrease in cataract size. Then after six days, all but two of the 13 rabbits had experienced a reduction in the severity of their cataracts. Likewise, the cataracts of the dog also shrunk and almost disappeared. The results were published in Nature.
So whats the next step?
The study identified lanosterol identified as a key molecule in the prevention of amyloids on that would bring us to a new way to approach cataract prevention and treatment. For the scientists, the next step is to further investigate how the lanosterol-based eye drops are working and then to see if they bring the same positive results when tested on humans.