Retina Repairs

Retinal vascular disease can be caused by, among other things, diabetes and high blood pressure, and impairs the vision of tens of millions of people worldwide. But advances in stem cell research offer hope for its future treatment. For example, researchers have recently developed retinal endothelial cells from human induced pluripotent stem cells (meaning adult cells were first deprogrammed into stem cells, then reprogrammed into retinal cells), and the resulting cells could not only develop into vascular networks in culture – a valuable resource for testing drugs – but also rebuild blood vessels in the eyes of mice. The image on the left shows the damaged retinal vasculature of a mouse with retinopathy, while that on the right shows a similar retina after the introduction, integration and growth of the stem cell-derived endothelial cells (green). The findings are thus an encouraging step towards the use of such cells in the clinic.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Ying-Yu Lin and Parker Esswein and colleagues, Duke University
• Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
• Image originally published with no restrictions – hence published here with as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, June 2026