Abstract
Presentation Description :
The non-human primate (NHP) has both a similar visual system and a similar immune system to the human and is the gold-standard model for evaluating cell based regenerative therapies in the eye. Pre-clinical development of photoreceptor replacement therapies in NHP has been challenging due to both the lack of widely available models of foveal vision loss and the difficulty of evaluating donor cell survival and integration where the timescales are uncertain and restored connectivity may occur on the cellular scale. We present recent work leveraging adaptive optics retinal imaging technology as a pre-clinical development platform for Macaca fascicularis. We create test regions of photoreceptor ablation that are axially and laterally confined, track the survival and morphology of fluorescently labelled human embryonic stem cell derived photoreceptor precursors in the sub-retinal space, and review progress towards visualizing immune cell activity and restored function in the living eye.
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.