Components behind age-related macular degeneration also important in other diseases, suggesting similarly designed therapies as potential treatments for a range of conditions.

With the National Eye Institute reporting that about 11 million older adults in the U.S. endure a condition that leads to progressive blindness, known as age-related macular degeneration, University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers are starting to understand what goes wrong in the disease, in order to develop new therapies to treat it.

Using human tissue and mice in their new study, published on June 23 in Nature Communications, they showed that the process which removes the eye’s old, damaged light sensors is disrupted in macular degeneration.