By Cara Murez HealthDay Reporter
(HealthDay)
WEDNESDAY, Jan. 4, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Researchers studying dry eye disease in mice have found that the condition can alter how the cornea heals itself. They’ve also identified potential treatments.
“We now have drugs, but they only work well in about 10% to fifteen% of patients,” said senior researcher Dr. Rajendra Apte, a professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “On this study involving genes which can be key to eye health, we identified potential targets for treatment that appear different in dry eyes than in healthy eyes.”
Tens of hundreds of thousands of individuals around the globe, including 15 million in the US, have eye pain and blurred vision in consequence of complications and injury related to dry eye disease, Apte said in a university news release.
“By targeting these proteins, we may give you the chance to more successfully treat and even prevent those injuries,” he said.
In dry eye disease, the attention can’t provide adequate lubrication with natural tears. Various sorts of drops may help replace those, but when the eyes are dry, the cornea is more vulnerable to injury.
The researchers found that proteins made by stem cells that regenerate the cornea could also be recent targets for treating and stopping such injuries.
To review this, the investigators analyzed genes expressed by the cornea in several mouse models. They checked out dry eye disease, diabetes and other conditions.
In mice with dry eye, the cornea activated a gene called SPARC. Higher levels of the SPARC protein were related to higher healing.
“We conducted single-cell RNA sequencing to discover genes essential to maintaining the health of the cornea, and we consider that a couple of of them, particularly SPARC, may provide potential therapeutic targets for treating dry eye disease and corneal injury,” said first creator Joseph Lin, an MD/PhD student in Apte’s lab.
“These stem cells are essential and resilient and a key reason corneal transplantation works so well,” Apte said. “If the proteins we’ve identified don’t pan out as therapies to activate these cells in individuals with dry eye syndrome, we may even give you the chance to transplant engineered limbal stem cells to forestall corneal injury in patients with dry eyes.”
Nevertheless, research in animals often yields different ends in humans.
The findings were published online Jan. 2 within the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The U.S. National Eye Institute has more on dry eye.
SOURCE: Washington University School of Medicine, news release, Jan. 2, 2023
Copyright © 2023 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
