Treatment with eye drops instead of injection of 'yellow degeneration' for blindness disease in the elderly

[Anchor]
Macular degeneration is a disease in which vision decreases due to abnormalities in the macula, the center of the retina.

Researchers in Korea have developed an eye-catching treatment material that drops eye drops on the eyes, not the conventional injection method.

This is reporter Lee Sung Kyu.

[Reporter]
In addition to glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, one of the three major blindness diseases in old age,
Macular degeneration
is a disease in which vision decreases and objects appear distorted due to abnormalities in the macula on the back of the eye.

90% of all macular degeneration patients are dry, and the current treatment is a direct injection into the eye, causing great inconvenience to patients.

Researchers in Korea have developed a dry macular degeneration treatment material that is administered to the eye.

The researchers noted the inflammatory signaling of Toll-like receptors, known as the main cause of macular degeneration, and explored substances that inhibit this signaling.

An inflammatory response is an immune response for our body to protect itself against bacterial or viral infections, but an excessive inflammatory response causes severe inflammatory diseases.

The researchers first built 190,000 peptides with a structure similar to that of proteins involved in transmitting Toll-like receptor inflammatory signals in nature.

Among them, we selected the final peptide substance that blocks the inflammatory signal itself by suppressing the interaction between inflammatory signal transmission proteins.

[Im Yoon / KIST Gangneung Branch Ph.D. Researcher: Toll-like receptors bind to the adapter protein below to transmit sub-signals. The peptides we made intervene in the binding between the adapter protein and the toll-like receptor, preventing the two from binding to prevent inflammatory signals.

[Reporter]
The researchers also verified the therapeutic effect by putting the discovered peptide substance into the eyes of mice that induced dry macular degeneration.

Peptides are small-sized proteins with about 50 amino acids connected, and they are small in size, so they enter cells well and have the advantage of high drug delivery efficiency.

[Seo Moon-hyung / KIST Lead Researcher: When the drug was administered to mice with dry macular degeneration induced, the pathological symptoms of dry macular degeneration were confirmed to be treated cleanly when our peptide was administered.]

[Reporter]
The researchers plan to conduct global human clinical trials in partnership with domestic and foreign pharmaceutical companies to commercialize the developed material.

I'm Lee Sung Kyu of YTN Science.