Shaping the Microglia in Retinal Degenerative Diseases Using Stem Cell Therapy: Practice and Prospects

Abstract

Retinal degenerative disease (RDD) refers to a group of diseases with retinal degeneration that cause vision loss and affect people’s daily lives. Various therapies have been proposed, among which stem cell therapy (SCT) holds great promise for the treatment of RDDs. Microglia are immune cells in the retina that have two activation phenotypes, namely, pro-inflammatory M1 and anti-inflammatory M2 phenotypes. These cells play an important role in the pathological progression of RDDs, especially in terms of retinal inflammation. Recent studies have extensively investigated the therapeutic potential of stem cell therapy in treating RDDs, including the immunomodulatory effects targeting microglia. In this review, we substantially summarized the characteristics of RDDs and microglia, discussed the microglial changes and phenotypic transformation of M1 microglia to M2 microglia after SCT, and proposed future directions for SCT in treating RDDs.

Exosome-based crosstalk in glaucoma pathogenesis: a focus on oxidative stress and neuroinflammation

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Bioengineering Human Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Retinal Organoids and Optic Vesicle-Containing Brain Organoids for Ocular Diseases

“…Due to their various functions, it is believed that exosomes could potentially be used for treating ocular diseases. To date, various studies have been conducted on the use of exosomes to treat ocular diseases, involving exosomes derived from mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), ESCs, and neural progenitor cells [ 195 , 203 ]. A new study published recently by Zhou et al was the first to show that ROs produced from human iPSCs release exosomes and microvesicles with genetic cargo.…”

Editorial: Stem Cell-Based Therapy in Retinal Degeneration

“…The advanced stages of RD is characterized by the massive loss of retinal neurons, therefore, the direct use of stem cells to replace the injured neurons is also a research hotspot (Nazari et al, 2015). A number of studies have shown that stem cells transplanted into the damaged retina can differentiate into retinal cells, and even integrate into the retina to restore the visual function of RD (Gagliardi et al, 2019;Jin et al, 2021).…”