a world first to better understand eye diseases

“This is the first eye ever made transparent! It looks like a little transparent ping-pong ball.” With a big smile, Marie Darche, research engineer at the Vision Institute and the Quinze-Vingt hospital, shows the fruit of seven years of research work in a jar. Researchers have succeeded in making an entire human eye completely transparent, a world first which will allow scientists around the world to better study eye diseases and their mechanisms, which until now were little known.

This is a perfectly preserved eye, with its vessels, its nerves, taken from a deceased 47-year-old woman, who had donated her body to science. “She had blue eyes, very beautiful blue eyes,” indicates Marie Darche. The eye is one of the most complex organs; researchers have used the transparization technique. “A human being is not transparent… It’s the famous phrase ‘your father is not a glazier’! Light does not pass through a biological sample. The transparency technique therefore uses chemicals whose goal is to make a sample transparent.”

Researchers will now be able to understand how an eye works as a whole. “We are still very late compared to other areas. Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in the world. We have glaucoma, myopia… We don’t really know the reasons of the evolution of a disease. Why are some patients stationary and not others? We do not know the mechanisms of progression of the disease and we are unfortunately still very far from treatments in many pathologies.”

This world first gave rise to a publication in a scientific journal attached to the American group Nature, Communication Biology. “Many researchers and doctors are very enthusiastic about these new results, adds Marie Darche. Biology will finally be able to answer their questions.”

“Researchers will be able to ask us what the blood vessels, the nerves, the inflammatory cells look like in a myopic person, a person with glaucoma.”

Marie Darche, research engineer at the Vision Institute

at franceinfo

These results were modeled in 3D on a computer. Researchers will thus be able to compare healthy eyes and diseased eyes. Above all, this makes the results on this fully imaged eye accessible to researchers around the world. Because French scientists want to share the results of their work for free.