Scientists at the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center have received $4.9 million in grants from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state’s stem cell agency, to advance new stem cell-based treatments for irreversible vision loss and infertility.
Millions of people with geographic atrophy — an advanced, late-stage form of dry age-related macular degeneration — experience progressive, irreversible vision loss, and no existing treatment can restore retinal tissue that has been lost to this disease. Stem cell-based approaches offer the possibility of replacing damaged retinal cells, but the survival of transplanted cells can be unpredictable in diseased tissue.
Barzelay-Wollman’s $2.5 million award will support her laboratory’s work to understand why. Her research will focus on the transition zone — the irregular boundary between surviving retina and areas of complete atrophy, where some of the last viable retinal cells are found. By studying this critical region in human tissue, her team aims to identify the biological conditions that determine whether transplanted retinal cells survive and integrate or fail.
Using human donor tissue, stem cell-derived retinal cells and advanced molecular analyses, Barzelay-Wollman and her team will map the cellular, molecular and structural features of distinct retinal environments and test how transplanted cells respond within them. The findings could reveal which local conditions help or hinder transplanted-cell survival and whether those barriers can be modified, providing a foundation for more effective regenerative therapies for geographic atrophy.
The project also includes a collaboration with Dr. Tsu-Chin “T-C.” Tsao, distinguished professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA, who will contribute engineering expertise to a component of the study involving precision robotics.
A physician-scientist, Barzelay-Wollman treats patients with retina diseases at the UCLA Doris Stein Eye Research Center and is a former clinical fellow in the Broad Stem Cell Research Center Training Program .
Infertility affects about one in six people of reproductive age, yet many cases remain unexplained. Some may originate very early in embryonic development, when primordial germ cells — the cells that eventually give rise to eggs and sperm — first form.
Clark is a co-investigator on a collaborative project led by Dr. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, professor of biology and biological engineering at the California Institute of Technology. Their $2.4 million award will support efforts to understand the surrounding tissues and signals that guide primordial germ cells as they emerge.
Using two complementary stem cell-derived models of early human development, their teams will map where and when primordial germ cells arise, identify the neighboring tissues that guide them and determine which molecular signals are essential for their development.
By creating a more detailed blueprint of this process, the researchers hope to uncover early mechanisms that contribute to infertility and help scientists more accurately recreate human germ cell development in the lab, laying a foundation for future approaches to diagnosis and treatment.
Clark is the inaugural director of the UCLA Center for Reproductive Science, Health and Education .