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Neves’s project builds on the pioneering work of Buck faculty member Dr. Deepak Lamba, who developed a method to generate photoreceptors, the cells in the eye that detect light, from stem cells and transplant them into retinas of blind mice, partially restoring vision. While groundbreaking, the impact of this procedure is still limited. Dr. Neves’s goal is to find protective factors that can promote tissue repair and can be used to improve transplant efficiency enough to make this a viable treatment for retinal degeneration.

This part of her project involves Dr. Henri Jasper’s lab, which focuses on the mechanisms of stress signaling. “Can we use the fly to find factors which are protective and support the tissue repair process in mice?” A previous project had identified a role for immune cells in tissue repair after retinal damage and a number of genes that were upregulated in immune cells of the fly following damage. One of the most induced genes codes for the protein MANF, known to play a protective role in the nervous system. Neves confirmed that MANF is indeed upregulated in response to retinal damage in both the fly and the mouse, and protects photoreceptors from different types of damage. Her next experiments will ask if including MANF during transplantation improves photoreceptor survival and integration, a critical step toward moving this therapy from the lab to the clinic.

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