Marvellous mechanism supports retinal blood vessels 

Diabetic retinopathy and diabetic macular oedema are complications of diabetes. They affect the retina at the back of the eye and can lead to sight loss. The retina is the tissue that senses light and transmits signals to the brain, making vision possible. Diabetic retinal disease affects a large proportion of people with diabetes.

Vision loss due to diabetes occurs because of blood vessel dysfunction caused by high blood sugar. Blood vessel dysfunction leads to damage and death of retinal cells. To compensate for the broken blood vessels an overgrowth of new blood vessels is stimulated. These new vessels are weak and can burst, causing further damage.

Professor Karl Matter, professor of cell biology at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, has discovered a new mechanism, a protein called MarvelID3, that can be stimulated to reinforce the cells that form blood vessels. Previous studies suggest that this mechanism could be harnessed to protect against blood vessel dysfunction and vision loss in diabetes.

In this study, Professor Matter’s team will grow blood vessels in dishes to examine how this mechanism could be protective when blood sugar levels are elevated. They will also investigate how the health of the cells that make up blood vessels is affected by disease or stressors.

Using this information, they will be able to design new treatments using the MarvelID3 mechanism. They will then test these treatments in mice with diabetes. By analysing photographs of the retinas of treated mice, they will see whether the treatment has been effective.

This study aims to find out how this mechanism supports retinal blood vessels and test ways to use MarvelID3 to develop a new treatment for diabetic retinal disease.