We are delighted to announce the latest CHECT-funded research project on retinoblastoma drug development, which will be starting in January 2023. Professor Seigel, from the University at Buffalo, USA, describes her project below.
One challenge in developing new treatments for retinoblastoma (Rb) is to preserve vision by ensuring that retinoblastoma tumour cells are killed without damaging the surrounding unaffected retina. For this project, we have a new approach for testing promising retinoblastoma drugs. We can coax adult human stem cells to represent normal retinal tissue in a plastic dish (a “retina-in-a-dish”). If we add human retinoblastoma tumour cells to this same dish, we can disrupt the retina, like an retinoblastoma tumour might do in the human eye. This mixture of retinoblastoma tumour cells with the retina-in-a-dish lets us use human cells to see whether our new drug treatments will kill retinoblastoma cells specifically without harming nearby retinal cells. This new method will be very useful for testing retinoblastoma treatments that we have developed with previous support from CHECT.
We will share our results in publications and at conferences, so that our results will have the potential to aid in retinoblastoma drug development by other scientists and benefit all people with retinoblastoma.
You may remember Professor Seigel and her team from a previous CHECT-funded project . To learn more about our research projects, visit the research section of our website.