VIDEO: Human donor tissues opening research options in diabetic retinopathy

NEW ORLEANS — In this video exclusive, Patrice E. Fort, PhD, a research assistant professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Michigan, discusses his presentation on human donor tissues for diabetic retinopathy and data that have been collected on human patients regarding the degeneration aspects of the disease.

Fort and colleagues have been trying to understand what the mechanism is for degeneration in diabetic neuropathy in humans rather than animal models and have been gathering information on patients with diabetes with different stages of the disease and information on human tissues that have been collected.

In the past, human tissues were almost always exclusively fixed tissues only allowing for cell analysis. The use of human donor tissues allows researchers to look at all mechanisms of the disease.