Tag Archives: silk fibroin biofilm

1st biohybrid artificial retina built with silk fibroin & retinal cells

A December 12, 2020 news item on Nanowerk announces a step forward in the development of artificial retinas,

“The biohybrid retina is a cell therapy for the reconstruction of the damaged retina by implanting healthy cells in the patient’s eye,” says Fivos Panetsos, director of the Neuro-computation and Neuro-robotics Group of the UCM and member of the Institute of Health Research of the Hospital Clínico San Carlos de Madrid (IdISSC).

A December 11, 2020 Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) press release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, delves further,

The cells of the artificial retina adhere to very thin silk fibroin biofilms – a biomaterial 100% biocompatible with human tissue – and covered by a gel which protects them during eye surgery and allows them to survive during the time they need to get integrated with the surrounding tissue after transplantation.

“The transplanted retina also contains mesenchymal cells that function as producers of neuroprotective and neuroreparative molecules and facilitate functional integration between implanted and patient cells”, adds UCM’s researcher and director of the study, published in the Journal of Neural Engineering .

One more step in a problem with more than 196 million affected

To build this artificial retina, researchers have developed silk fibroin films with mechanical characteristics similar to Bruch’s membrane – the layer of cells that supports the neural retina. Then, they have biofunctionalized them so that retinal cells could adhere, and on them they have grown epithelial and neural cells. Finally, they have carried out an in vitro study of the structural and functional characteristics of the biohybrid.

Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is a neurodegenerative disease that causes a progressive loss of central vision and even blindness in its most advanced stage. Triggered by heterogeneous, complex and still poorly understood mechanisms, it is the leading cause of irreversible vision loss in people over 65 years of age and affects more than 196 million people worldwide.

AMD is an incurable disease, and current treatments can only alleviate symptoms and slow down the progression of the disease. “This research is an important step towards solving the problem of blindness faced by AMD patients”, concludes Panetsos.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

First steps for the development of silk fibroin-based 3D biohybrid retina for age-related macular degeneration (AMD) by Nahla Jemni-Damer, Atocha Guedan-Duran, Jasmin Cichy, Paloma Lozano-Picazo, Daniel Gonzalez-Nieto, José Perez-Rigueiro, Francisco Rojo, Gustavo V. Guinea, Assunta Virtuoso, Giovanni Cirillo, Michele Papa, Félix Armada-Maresca, Carlota Largo-Aramburu, Salvador D Aznar-Cervantes, José L Cenis, and Fivos Panetsos.Journal of Neural Engineering, Volume 17, Number 5 (or 2020 Neural Eng. 17 055003) DOI: doi: 10.1088/1741-2552/abb9c0 Published 28 October 2020 • © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd

This paper is behind a paywall.