At the foot of the Collserola mountain range, in Barcelona, sits a white building with imposing geometry that houses one of the most advanced ophthalmological centers in the world , the Institute of Ocular Microsurgery (IMO). Its facilities have 70 consultations and 8 operating rooms, where a team of 200 professionals carry out 65,000 visits and 8,000 operations each year. With more than 25 years of experience, IMO is dedicated to comprehensive eye health care.
There are numerous tests that show that IMO plays in the league of international reference centers , such as the medical team, the trajectory and the results. Many patients go to this specialized center for a professional to name their disease. These are patients with minority pathologies, usually of genetic origin and difficult to diagnose as they are rare, affecting one in every 2,000 people. Most are degenerative and currently lack treatment, which in many cases leads to blindness.
The leading cause of inherited blindness
The main cause of hereditary blindness in developed countries is associated with retinal dystrophies , a collection of degenerative pathologies. Although it still does not have treatment, there are different strategies to slow its progression. Therefore, the time of diagnosis is a crucial factor in offering the appropriate therapy. Depending on the genes that are involved, the prognosis of the disease varies greatly. For example, if the mutation that causes the disease is in the ABCA4 gene, it is better to do without vitamin A supplements, as it worsens its progression.
In this sense, IMO is one of the few European centers that since 2013 has a molecular biology laboratory to diagnose and treat patients with eye diseases like this. The joint work of ophthalmologists and geneticists makes it possible to diagnose more than 30 pathologies that affect different parts of the eye, determine their progression, know their inheritance pattern to prevent the disease in children and prepare them for future therapies.
A few months ago, the IMO team of geneticists published 63 mutations associated with retinal dystrophies in Scientific Reports , of which 21 variants were new. This advance contributes to the improvement of diagnostic tools to detect the gene responsible for the disease and confirm the clinical diagnosis.
In the laboratory they carry out basic research, both to know what are the molecular bases of ophthalmological diseases of genetic origin, and to find new treatments. “We intuit that the future scenario involves gene and cell therapies,” says Borja Corcóstegui, co-founder and medical and scientific director of IMO.
The future is through gene and cell therapy
One of IMO’s newest lines of research resides in the cell culture room, inaugurated less than a year ago, where researchers analyze what mechanisms are behind the degeneration of vision and test new therapies that could see the light in next years.
An increasingly personalized medicine
Everyone has two eyes, but they are not all the same. The personalization of medicine, that is, treatment based on the patient’s profile, also has an impact on ophthalmology. That is why the professionals in IMO’s cornea, cataract and refractory surgery department customize the lens based on the aberration of the eye, beyond compensating for myopia.
In vision, therapy tailored to the person is also relevant. For this reason, in corneal surgery cases, now only the damaged part is selectively replaced and not all, as had been done in recent years. In patients with severe dry eye or corneal wounds that do not heal properly, an eye drop rich in growth factors is manufactured from the patient’s own blood plasma. Likewise, regenerative medicine based on the expansion of corneal stem cells is applied in cases of healing problems associated with burns or congenital diseases of the cornea.
Precision medicine and research in ophthalmology, especially in gene and cell therapies, are two of the pillars that support IMO, the reference center in eye health that stands as the cathedral of vision, at the foot of the park natural of Collserola.
