The human body has the ability to regenerate tissues such as the liver, heart or skin to continue functioning. But what happens with an organ as essential to maintain the quality of life as the retina? Well, evolutionary, humans have lost the ability to regenerate it.
In the sixth episode of the second season of ‘La mare de la ciència’, the Catalan podcast of the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB), we talk, precisely, about ‘regenerating the retina‘ with Sergi Bonilla, who did his PhD at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG).
He studied whether it was possible to grow human retinas in the laboratory. And once he succeeded, he started to “awaken” the regenerative capacity of some of the cells of this organ. He saw that by fusing different cell types it is possible to recover a certain regenerative capacity of selected cell types. And that these cells can be integrated into human eye organoids.
Despite the only incipient results, Sergi is optimistic and sees this study as a first step towards the development of new translational research projects that will help researchers to find solutions to patients’ specific problems.
In this episode Sergi also talks about the experience of doing a PhD: the ups and downs of this stage and that research can contributed to from many different ways. In short, that at the end of the day, there is life outside the laboratory.
Don’t miss his testimony!
