Host: The Japanese Society of Toxicology
Name : The 49th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Toxicology
Date : June 30, 2022 - July 02, 2022
Glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and retinitis pigmentosa are the leading causes of blindness in Japan. All of these retinal diseases cause degeneration of the retina and eventually lead to blindness as a result of disease progression. However, the mechanisms of pathogenesis and progression of these diseases have not been fully elucidated, and further investigation of their underlying mechanisms and the discovery of new therapeutic targets are needed. We have established retinal disease models using rodents (rats and mice) to elucidate the pathogenesis of these diseases and to identify new therapeutic targets. However, it is difficult to translate the results of pathological studies in rodents to humans, because the anatomy of the retina and optic nerve in rodents is largely different from that in humans, including the lack of the macula, which is the most important region for vision. In recent decades, biopharmaceutical drugs, including anti-human antibodies, have been widely used as medicines, and in many cases, it is not possible to evaluate the efficacy of drugs in rodents due to the issues of cross-relativities between human and rodent species. Therefore, we are currently using non-human primates, such as cynomolgus monkeys and common marmosets, as models of glaucoma (Shimazawa et al., Exp Eye Res 82: 427-40, 2006, 2013, Exp Eye Res 111: 1-8, 2013) and exudative AMD (Shimazawa et al., Curr Neurovasc Res 12: 128-34, 2015, Inagaki et al., Curr Neurovasc Res 17: 420-428, 2020), and use them for pathological studies and evaluation of drug efficacies. In this symposium, I will introduce the pathological studies obtained from retinal disease models and their drug discovery approaches, focusing on our research findings.
