Research progress and problems of retinal pigment epithelium transplantation / 中华实验眼科杂志

ABSTRACT

In recent years, promising results have been achieved in retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cell transplantation in the treatment of diseases such as age-related macular degeneration.The types of transplanted RPE cells include autologous RPE cells, autologous iris pigment epithelium cells, allogeneic fetal RPE cells, allogeneic adult RPE cells, human embryonic stem sell-derived RPE cells, induced pluripotent stem cell-derived RPE cells.According to the transplantation method, RPE cell transplantation can be divided into RPE cell suspension transplantation and RPE cell sheets transplantation.The research on the autologous RPE cells and iris pigment epithelial cells has been reduced due to their limited materials.Fetal RPE cells, which have low immunogenicity and can produce a large number of donor RPE cells, are ideal sources of transplanted cells.Human embryonic stem cell-derived RPE cells and induced pluripotent stem cell-derived RPE cells have adverse effects, including teratogenicity and genetic instability, so transplanted RPE cells need to be optimized.In this article, the experimental researches related to RPE cell transplantation in recent years, the efficacy of transplantation and the existing problems were reviewed.The future trend of RPE cell transplantation may be to establish a comprehensive evaluation system for transplanted cells to screen out relatively suitable donor cells.