Page 97 - Read Online

Ma et al. J Transl Genet Genom 2022;6:179-203 https://dx.doi.org/10.20517/jtgg.2021.48 Page 195

Figure 4. The cells which are theoretically available to cell therapy for reinforcement of sclera in pathologic myopia. Fibroblasts and
myofibroblasts are scleral cells maintaining scleral biomechanics. Scleral stem cells might be the native stem cell in sclera. MSCs are
stromal cells with the abilities of self-renewal and multilineage differentiation. MSCs exert their therapeutic effect by various paracrine
growth factors. The media of MSCs also contains growth factors. Therefore, these cells and media can be made into products and
delivered to the posterior sclera and fix the sclera. MSCs: Mesenchymal stem cells.

the common goal of ophthalmologists and scientists. Cell-based therapy has opened a new era of treatment.
Stem cell-based therapy has been regarded as the future of medicine and thrown light upon curing incurable
diseases. Treatments by stem cell transplantation have made great progress in corneal and retinal
degenerative diseases. It is hopeful that the atrophic structures in myopic eyes can be replaced by stem cells
and renew the tissue. The preliminary work has shown a promising way in stem cell-based therapy of
patients with myopic maculopathy. Therefore, it is possible to achieve the ambitious goal by stem cell-based
therapy.

DECLARATIONS
Acknowledgments
Figure 2 to Figure 4 in this article are created with BioRender.com. We thank all members of 502 team for
the discussion.

Authors’ contributions
Original draft: Ma Y
Review & Editing: Li YP
Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Supervision: Jin ZB

Availability of data and materials
Not applicable.

Financial support and sponsorship
This work is partly supported by the National Key R&D Project (2017YFA0105300), Beijing Natural Science
Foundation (Z200014) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (82125007).