What Is Proliferative Vitreoretinopathy?

Proliferative vitreoretinopathy (PVR) is a blinding disorder secondary to penetrating ocular trauma, retinal detachment, or surgery to repair retinal detachment. PVR is characterized by an abnormal wound-healing process that occurs following retinal detachment or other ocular trauma, manifesting as excessive inflammation within the eye. In the past few decades, although many drugs have shown significant efficacy in animal models of PVR, none of them have been successfully applied clinically due to limited efficacy in humans, and vitrectomy is still the main clinical treatment. This is due to the unclear pathogenesis of PVR and the inability of established animal models to fully reflect the disease process. This results in the lack of clinical efficacy of drugs tested using these models. As a popular biological model, the rabbit has many advantages, such as easy acquisition and handling, small lens size, and a large posterior chamber close to the human vitreous volume, which makes it an ideal model for studying PVR physiopathological molecular mechanisms.

Fig. 1. Fundus photo, H&E staining and immunohistochemical staining of a rabbit eye with severe PVR. (Wong CW, et al., 2019)

Service Overview

A comprehensive understanding of PVR pathophysiology may ultimately aid in the development of targeted therapeutic strategies. This requires excellent experimental PVR models that mimic human disease and can be used for drug screening. At Ace Therapeutics, our researchers can provide a variety of methods for creating animal models of PVR, such as cell induction, biological induction, cellular and biological induction, surgical induction, and postoperative cellular or biological induction. Thanks to the in-depth understanding of PVR, Ace Therapeutics has been constantly exploring suitable PVR animal models to meet research needs. Here, we describe the two most commonly used rabbit PVR models for PVR research, the surgically-induced rabbit PVR model and the cell-induced rabbit PVR model.

Explore Ace Therapeutics' Rabbit Models of Proliferative Vitreoretinopathy

• Rabbit model of cell-induced proliferative vitreoretinopathy

Ace Therapeutics' cell-induced rabbit PVR model is achieved by injecting fibroblasts into the rabbit vitreous. This is due to the rabbit's response to these exogenous fibroblasts, and such injections can trigger the development of retinal and intravitreal proliferative membranes within days of injection, eventually leading to retinal detachment.

Model characteristics: New Zealand white rabbits treated with fibroblasts developed retinal detachment features within a short period of time, accompanied by inflammatory cell infiltration, migration of RPE cells from the subretinal space, and loss of RPE hexagonal shape to a fibroblast-like appearance.

• Rabbit model of surgically-induced proliferative vitreoretinopathy

Ace Therapeutics researchers induce retinal detachment in anesthetized New Zealand white rabbits by vitrectomy, retinotomy, and injection of balanced salt solution at 4 different sites in the underlying retina. The follow-up period was 12 weeks.

Model Characteristics: This surgically induced model is based on a human pathogenesis model, PVR following retinal detachment, that mirrors clinically relevant disease. In addition, the onset of PVR in mechanistic injury models is approximately 4-12 weeks, similar to what is observed in humans. This allows our clients to evaluate drugs and long-term interventions.

Available Support Services

In order to carefully monitor retinal pathological changes over time and evaluate pharmacodynamics, our researchers took fundus images at different time points and performed a full range of evaluations, including but not limited to:

• IOP measurement.
• Fundus photography.
• Histopathological analysis.
• Immunohistochemical analysis.
• Molecular biology analysis.

Ace Therapeutics aims to provide customers worldwide with a powerful experimental tool to explore many aspects of PVR. This includes elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying PVR physiopathology as well as discovering and evaluating potential new therapeutic strategies. If you are interested in our services or need more detailed information, please feel free to contact us. Our experienced scientists are ready to help you!

References

1. Wong CW, Cheung N, Ho C, et al. Characterisation of the inflammatory cytokine and growth factor profile in a rabbit model of proliferative vitreoretinopathy. Sci Rep. 2019, 9(1):15419.
2. Datlibagi A, Zein-El-Din A, Frohly M, et al. Experimental Models to Study Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition in Proliferative Vitreoretinopathy. Int J Mol Sci. 2023, 24(5):4509.

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