Foundation Fighting Blindness Victory for Vision Campaign

At Schepens Eye Research Institute of Mass. Eye and Ear, Dr. Young studies the repair of the mature, diseased central nervous system. He is interested in the degeneration that occurs in the retina during disease or injury.

Dr. Young is currently studying human retinal stem cells with the goal of transplanting these cells to the diseased eye to establish functional connectivity between donor retinal stem cells and the mature, diseased host retina. His research focuses on gene and protein expression, substrate specific differentiation, and retinal transplantation in mice and pigs.

“Because of the tremendous progress made, thanks in part to Foundation funding, we are really on the cusp of restoring vision to lots and lots of people,” — Dr. Michael Young

Dr. Young and his colleagues now aim to establish a novel stem cell therapy using retinal progenitor cells grafted to the mature, diseased host retina. This approach will allow them to make important steps toward their goal of functional restoration of vision.

His work is behind the success of ReNeuron, a cellular therapy developer in the UK that has reported vision improvements in the treated eyes of the first three retinitis pigmentosa (RP) patients in the Phase 2 part of the Phase 1/2 clinical trial for its proprietary human retinal progenitor cells (hRPC). The Phase 1 portion of the trial, completed last year, primarily assessed safety in subjects with minimal remaining vision.

The Foundation recently funded Dr. Young for pre-clinical and translational studies for thehRPC that helped make the ReNeuron trial possible. The hRPC are stem cells that have almost fully developed into photoreceptors, the retinal cells that make vision possible.