Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ECaBox (ECaBox "Eyes in a Care Box": Regenerating human retina from resuscitated cadaveric eyes)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-02-29
Foundation of new translational research technologies
The reactivated developmental programs that lower vertebrates use to regrow a functional organ inspire regenerative medicine. Cell-based therapies have already revolutionized several aspects of modern medicine and it is widely accepted that regenerative approaches have a disruptive potential to innovate health care. However, pioneering technologies are needed to support the translation of basic research into therapeutic realities. ECaBox will have an enormous impact in advancing regenerative medicine by providing an intact human organ ex vivo. The medical need for novel therapeutic strategies for blindness is enormous as current treatments are limited in scope and often do not offer curative solutions. Thus, the ECaBox will tackle several challenges and produce:
• Novel technology to test emerging treatments without animal research.
• More predictive pre-clinical studies at significantly reduced costs. This will allow more drug candidates and approaches to be tested faster and more reliably.
• Novel knowhow and technologies to support the competitiveness of European industry in regenerative medicine.
• Technology expandable to other neurodegenerative diseases and ex vivo organ systems.
Social and economic impact of retinal regeneration
Impaired vision affects over 250 million people worldwide and 36 million are blind. As retinal degenerations are often not curable, due to the increase in the ageing population vision loss will have a major impact on individuals, families, communities, and nations unless cost-effective curative treatments become available. The market of ophthalmic drugs was $30 billion in 2016, and it is growing at a fast pace. Any new drug has to recover several billion in a time span limited by the patent duration and competing drugs on the market. Improved productivity of the drug development process by providing access to valuable human tissue with the ECaBox holds great potential not only in cost savings, but also to unleash modern translational research capabilities onto new disease areas. The ECaBox will have a huge economic impact by decreasing the necessary investments for each drug reaching the market. It will also greatly reduce the use of animals in pre-clinical research.
Building leading research and innovation capacity across Europe
ECaBox will have a high impact on integrating current expertise in regenerative medicine at the frontier of different disciplines such as biomaterial science, stem cell biology, electrophysiology, chemical and material engineering, computational biology and modelling. Moreover, the ECaBox consortium is recruiting excellent PhD students and researchers who are trained in a fertile and highly interdisciplinary innovation environment to become future technology leaders prepared to overcome the current challenges in translating basic research such as stem cell differentiation into regenerative therapies.