A UCC research team is figuring out ways to strengthen ailing eye cells that could prevent blindness in later life, writes Claire O'Connell.
As you get on in years you may suddenly catch yourself holding the newspaper a little closer or further away to read it.
But, for the roughly 60,000 people in Ireland who suffer from eye degeneration, failing vision and eventual blindness can have a far more debilitating impact on their quality of life.
That's why scientists in Cork are seeking to beef up ailing eye cells and halt degeneration in a number of eye diseases.
"There's a whole gamut of different diseases, like retinitis pigmentosa [ RP], age-related macular degeneration [ AMD] and glaucoma, and they lead to blindness," says Tom Cotter, professor of biochemistry at University College Cork (UCC). "There are very few treatments for these conditions, and you are losing one of your five senses."
The problem in these diseases is that cells at the back of the eye progressively die away and can no longer pass information back to the brain to form an image, explains Cotter. The cells die through a suicidal implosion called apoptosis, a process that Cotter's group has studied for more than 15 years.
The body often uses apoptosis naturally to remove old or damaged cells that are then replaced, but when cells at the back of the eye die, they do not grow back and vision fails, he explains. "The eye cells are dying before the end of their life. And once they are gone, they are gone."
Now, Cotter's group is looking to the death-defying tricks of cancer cells to learn how to keep the eye cells alive for longer and slow down degeneration. "In cancer we are trying to understand how cells stay alive when they should die," he says.
"The cancer cells are great at fighting to survive, the poor eye cells are not. The eye cells put up a fight but it's just not strong enough at a molecular level. We want to get them to fight a little bit harder. We are trying to lower the stress for them and beef up the survival."
The UCC-based team and their collaborators have now identified a group of chemicals that look "very promising" on eye cells in the lab, and they hope to develop an eye drop that could slow cell death down and allow people to keep their sight for longer.
"We will know in two years if these chemicals have clinical promise or not," says Cotter, who was recently awarded €1.65 million from Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland to continue the work.
And there's little chance of the souped-up eye cells becoming cancerous, he notes.
"I don't think you are going to push it to the other extreme, because these cells don't have the capacity to divide. There are very few eye cancers," he says.
The group's findings could also have knock-on effects for other degenerative conditions, explains Cotter.
"In several other degenerative brain diseases, from Alzheimer's to Parkinson's, you are losing particular types of brain cells and the mechanism is apoptosis," he says.
"If you can block cell death in one disease, chances are you can block it in another disease. This is why there's so much interest, not only from universities but also from pharmaceutical companies."
The work is supported by the charity Fighting Blindness, www.fightingblindness.ie