University of Ottawa professor receives $2.4 million to develop stem-cell therapies to reverse blindness
March 4, 2009 – A vision research team led by Dr. Valerie Wallace, associate professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa and senior scientist at the Ottawa Health Research Institute, is embarking on a five-year, $2.4 million collaborative project to develop stem-cell therapies to reverse blindness. The Foundation Fighting Blindness, Canada’s largest private charity for vision research, is partnering with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to fund the program.
“This project is unique because it brings the best stem-cell researchers together with innovative eye surgeons and experts in biomaterials and tissue engineering,” said Dr. Wallace. “We are really focused on developing new therapies that can help the eye regenerate and restore vision.”
Stem-cell therapies may be able to help more than one million Canadians affected by degenerative eye diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa, age-related macular degeneration and corneal diseases, all of which cause blindness. By replacing cells lost through disease or injury, stem-cell therapies could benefit anyone at any stage of eye disease.
The team hopes to design better methods for controlling stem cells and ultimately coax them into producing different kinds of eye cells, like those in the retina or the cornea. This is currently the greatest obstacle to successful stem-cell therapies.
Members of the team have already made huge contributions to vision research. Dr. Derek van der Kooy and Dr. Vincent Tropepe of the University of Toronto were the first to identify stem cells in the adult eye, while Dr. May Griffith of the Ottawa Health Research Institute and the University of Ottawa developed the first artificial cornea, which is now being tested in early-phase human trials. Dr. Bernard Hurley of The Ottawa Hospital and Dr. Per Fagerholm of Linköping University in Sweden are world-renowned eye surgeons. Dr. Carol Schuurmans of the University of Calgary and Dr. Wallace are both internationally recognized experts in the biology of the retina.
Canada’s Stem Cell Network has also played an important role in this research. In 2008, the Network and the Foundation Fighting Blindness completed a five-year research partnership that set the stage for this team, and the Network recently committed an additional $700,000 for a complementary research project, also led by Dr. Wallace.
For more information, please visit the Ottawa Health Research Institute http://www.ohri.ca/newsroom/newsstory.asp?ID=166
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Julie Tanguay
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University of Ottawa
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