 Good morning, my name is Linda Lako and I'm Professor of Stem Cell Sciences at Newcastle University. Together with my colleague Dr. Carla Mello, we've done some interesting work in generation of retinal progenitor cells from human embryonic stem cells. This work is going to be described in the recent stem cell paper published earlier this year, but we'd like to tell you a little bit more in this short video clip what we've tried to achieve. Diseases resulting in impairment of loss of vision can be a great burden for the individual and the society. The leading causes of visual loss are glaucoma, cataracts, corneal opacity and retinal degeneration. In the last 20 years, great advances have been made in treating corneal opacity with adult stem cells normally taken from the individual and the healthy eye. Yet, such progress has been lagging behind in the retinal regeneration field. Partially, this is due to lack of an accessible and easy identifiable source of retinal progenitor cells that can be used for transplantation purposes. However, progress has been made in the mouse model and from our current understanding of retinal development, we know that retinal progenitor cells are set very early during development. When transplanted into an animal model, this retinal progenitor cells are able to resume morphology and electrophysiological function typical of naive photoreceptors. Since human fetal development is ethically inaccessible, we've been focusing our attention on two sources of human stem cells, namely human embryonic and human induced vertebrate stem cells. Both the cell types have the ability to proliferate indefinitely in culture and have the potential to give rise to many of the cell types in the other organism and mimic this very early embryonic and fetal development. These two cell types have been largely the focus of my research group since 2003. Making retinal tissue from human stem cells presents an incredible opportunity to study the human retina in a way that has not previously been possible. Recent developments in stem cell research show not only that individual retinal cell types can be produced in a lab from stem cells, but that it is possible to grow sheets of retinal tissue containing many of the retinal cell types and which is built in a similar way to the developing eye during human development with each of the retinal cell subtypes developing within the correct anatomical layer. This lab-generated retina is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used to study human retinal development and disease, as well as test new treatments. One major caveat to this approach, however, is that the retinal tissue we're currently able to produce from stem cells is developmentally relatively immature and only very rarely are we able to obtain, for example, the formation of photoreceptor ita segments capable of the light response necessary for vision. For this reason, if this approach is to be broadly utilized for such purposes, we must find a reproducible and highly efficient way to make this neural tissue and help it to mature past the developmental stage we're currently able to obtain. In the work we've been doing in the lab, we find that retinal tissue made from stem cells much prefers to grow in 3D culture, where the developing areas of retinal tissue are not bound to the tissue culture surface but are free to float around in the culture medium. This seems to be much less restrictive for their growth and subsequent maturation. Further, we have identified one of the key factors which drives the process of retinal differentiation from stem cells in that it plays an important role in the survival and maturation of developing retinal tissue. This factor is called insulin-like growth factor, or IGF1. We find that adding this growth factor to our cultures corresponds to the formation of laminated retinal tissue and also encourage the maturation of the retinal cell types. Fascinatingly, our work has also found this factor encourages other tissue types associated with the eye to start to develop, such as the lens and cornea. This exciting result implicates IGF1 not only in retinal development and maturation, but the eye development as a whole. Another really exciting aspect to this work is that our protocol is very simple in comparison to other protocols and allows us to generate laminated retina in a shorter time frame and so bringing us closer to routinely producing useful retinal tissue which can be used to study development, disease and new treatments for blindness with greater ease.