Leaky Pipes

Leaky pipes, in your home or body, can be disastrous. Leaky blood vessels are a major factor causing blindness, increasingly-common in ageing populations and with rising diabetes rates. In both diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, new blood vessels grow, but they tend to leak, depriving the eyes of essential oxygen and flooding them with unfiltered substances. Current treatments block the action of VEGF, a molecule that prompts this new blood vessel formation, but in doing so also damage existing blood vessels, causing even more harm. A new study used fluorescent markers to highlight any leaks (magenta) in and around the blood vessels (green) of damaged mouse eyes. Mice with particular genetic mutations related to VEGF were still able to form new vessels, but did not show leakage. The next question is whether a drug can be developed to achieve the same effect, and provide a welcome sight for patients.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Ross O Smith and colleagues
• Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Rudbeck Laboratory, Science for Life Laboratory Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, April 2020