Study Identifies How Diabetes Slows Healing in the Eye

Investigators from Cedars-Sinai have provided new understanding of how diabetes delays wound healing in the eye, identifying for the first time two related disease-associated changes to the cornea, according to a company news release.

The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Diabetologia, also identified three therapeutic pathways that reversed these changes and partially restored wound-healing function to the cornea—a discovery that researchers say could ultimately inform new treatments for diabetes.

“We have found that diabetes induces more cellular changes than we were aware of previously,” Alexander Ljubimov, PhD, director of the Eye Program at Cedars-Sinai’s Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute and senior author of the paper, said in a company news release. “The discovery does not affect gene sequence but entails specific DNA modifications altering gene expression—what are known as epigenetic alterations.”

The new research also identifies for the first time an important role of Wnt-5a, a secreted signaling protein investigators found responsible for corneal wound healing and the function of stem cells—cells capable of differentiating into many cell types.

Read the full Cedars-Sinai article here.